What Is News? Audiences May Have Their Own Ideas

Abstract

This study examines what young adults consider to be news, comparing that with traditional news values as espoused by journalists and taught in journalism schools. Employing an online survey, we compared those views with the participants' assessment of whether 42 headlines are “news.” Findings indicated that traditional values of prominence, impact, and controversy were important to participants but that timeliness and proximity were less so. Opinion also emerged as a value.

Notes

¹ To be clear, our focus was how often our participants sought out this type of content. Our specific indicators were how often they enjoyed the content depicted in these shows. These are discussed further in the Methods section.

² To ensure that the inclusion of journalism and communication majors were not skewing the sample by employing values and norms learned in the classroom, the analysis was conducted using only the nonjournalism majors and no significant differences were found.

³ Objectivity is also defined as a journalistic norm by some scholars, such as Ryan (2001) and Hindman and Thomas (2013), who suggest that objectivity is what journalists need to achieve to be effective in their craft. However, we support the view of Gans (1979) and others that objectivity is a value that makes certain topics more newsworthy than others. Given our study's focus on what the audience believes is news, we felt that attempting to distinguish between objectivity as a journalistic value or norm was beyond the scope of our study.

⁴ The only effective way to measure timeliness is to include headlines that may no longer be timely; thus, some headlines may have seemed dated.

⁵ With the timeliness headlines, we asked participants whether they thought it was news if it was the first time they had encountered the story topic.