Media and Freedom of Speech. Controversies and Social Clashes. Vilnius University.

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CONFERENCE PAPER
Poverty and News Values
Dzina Donauskaite
2013 10 24

This presentation deals with a question of what news values are employed in
changing newsroom of digital age and what can be implications for its impact on
contemporary media role in public political communication of democratic societies.
I chose to analyse case of poverty reporting in one Lithuanian online newsroom,
Lietuvos rytas (Lithuanian Morning), which, at the time, was the second most popular online
newssource for Lithuanian audience.
I hypothesized that in 2008, because of facing global economic crisis, situation of
unprecedently raising inflation, prices of food, heating and other energy sources as well as the
end of one political cycle and the beginning of a new one, the poverty issue would be one of
the main concerns of Lithuanian journalists and editors. After conducting the research, I felt I
was right and wrong at the same time.
But before going to the results, some definitions and methodological explanations
are needed.
A news value is an atribute of a news event that, according to journalists,
transforms information into an interesting ‚story‘ for an audience . Franklin et al. (2005) in his
Key Concepts in Journalism studies refers to news values as to mythical set of criteria,
employed by journalists to measure newsworthiness of events. The notion of myth appears
here, because the decision of what is actually valuable is made from what is considered to be
the perspective of the audience. And, as McQuail (2010) noted these considerations not
necessarily reflect the reality of what actually might interests the audience.
One can find listing of classical journalistic news values in practical journalism
handbooks, but media and communication scholars are concerned with definition of news
values too.
Here on the left section the values proposed in the classical and very popular
practical journalism handbook by Mencher is listed. Listing in other sections are proposed by
prominent communication researchers and as you can see, changed over time.

1 table. News values

Mencher (1984) Galtung and Ruge Harcup and O‘Neil (2001)

(1965)

Impact (events that are likely to Bad news (as tragedy, accident);
affect many people) magnitude; good news (e.g.
rescues)
Timeliness (events that are Frequency;
immediate)

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Prominence (events involving well- Reference to elite Reference to the power- elite
known people or institutions nations; elite (individuals, organisations,
people nations); reference to celebrity;

Proximity (events in the circultation Cultural proximity Relevance (cultural proximity,

or broadcast area) (meaningfulness) political importance)

Conflict (slashes between people or Negativity Bad news (as conflict)

instiutions)

Bizzare (events that deviate sharply Unexpectedness Surprise

from the expected)

Currency (events and situations that Intensity; Follow-up stories;

are being talked about) continuity (follow-
up stories);
Personification; Entertainment (sex; human
interest; drama)

Unambiguity; The newspapers‘ agenda (both

Predictability politically and relating to the
(consonance); structure of the genre).
composition

There are two methods to discover news values – the first, through surveys of
journalists and/or former journalists; second – trough the content analysis. The later was
employed in my research here.
I coded my data regarding to listing of Harcup and O‘Neil (2001), whom analysed
national press of the UK, but had in mind, as McQuail (2010) noted that news values are
relative and globalisation processes might change pattern of what is considered to be more or
less stable criteria employed in the news decision-making.
Internet is one of the tools for globalisation and here I hope to demonstrate the
tendency that despite restrictions of national languages and national cultures, national online
media has a strong potential to be a facilitator of global cultural integration. Observations of
Digital news content production also might suggest that there is not much myth in prescribing
a news value for an event – mosto f the news flow is due to economic, legal and sometimes
illegal commitements.
As you can see from the following graph, poverty topic is quite a marginal one
within the overal newsfeed of lrytas.lt, however,it should be noted that the year 2008 was the
first year when the newsroom started to work more closelly on releasing short video features
exclusivelly for their internet audience.

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1st graph. Poverty-related news within overal news flow in lrytas.lt (2008 08-09)
200
News
150 feed

100 Video

50 Poverty

0 Video
poverty

Lrytas.lt started from 3 to 10 video features a day. News related to poverty from
the beginning were among those few news features.
However, from the perspective of quality and editorial attention to the topic of
poverty, it should be noted that it was very modest. The proportion of original (which means
made by newsrooms journalists themselves) and other content was uneven. 17 news items
were produced by the newsroom journalists themselves, while the rest 43 news items came
from other sources. The newsroom use extensivelly content provided by national and
international news agencies (Reuters, AFP, BNS etc.), relies on reports from other domestic
press, but more often on foreign online media and press.

2ndgraph. Proportion of
original and other type of
communication production
content within the news flow 60
I should note here
that my sample is relativelly
small – 60 news from August 40 3
Thematic framing
and September 2008. This
report is from an on-going Episodic framing
broader research and my 20 40
conclusions here are about 7
tendencies, proportions and 10
further research directions. I am 0
not aiming to demonstrate Original production Other type of production
statistical significance here.
After getting some insight of where the newsroom is getting its news from, I
analysed the question of were there differences in debt and scope of reporting between
original and other kind of content? As you can see from the same slide, there were some
differences, but not striking. Framing analysis revealed that episodic frame (which is the way
of telling story without analysing patterns and structural causes of the problem presented)

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was dominant, while thematic framing (which concerns with processes and issues) was rare.
For example, there were poverty issue discussed as a result of inequality and unjust wealth
distribution while talking about such countries as Switzerland, Saudo Arabia and US. But
nothing similar to this was found in the content about domestic poverty.
Data analysis has shown (3rd graph) that the newsroom employes 6 main news
values while reporting poverty and choosing to distribute stories from other news sources
about poverty. The most significant one was dealing with impact issues. Those stories were
about global humanitarian crisis, so to say, dealing with poverty as a result of force majeure,
such as hurricanes, floods or war (there was war in Georgia at the time and Lithuanian media
facilitated public involvement in international aid iniciatives).

3rd graph. News values in poverty reporting

IMPACT 21 0

PROXIMITY 3 13
Poverty in foreign
ENTERTAINME
3 2 countries
NT/BIZZARE
Domestic poverty
PROMINENCE
5 4

CONFLICT 0 5

0 10 20 30
Even though threat of economic crisis was all over the world and one political
cycle was ending in Lithuania (October was a month for new parliament election), there were
relativelly small proportion of reporting on domestic political issues related to poverty. It is
worth to note that poverty level in Lithuania was growing even when country‘s economy was
growing, but this fact didn‘t triger broader political discussions in the media about that.
I would say that one of the main findings of my analysis was that the news value of proximity
is potentially fading and loosing its significance in a Digital newsroom. The value of proximity
means news makters decisions regarding the relevance of a news event to the audience in the
broadcast area, it also refers to cultural proximity and political importance. The data was also
coded in regard of who are those poor presented in the news articles – living in other
countries or living in Lithuania – and the result was surprising: almost 2/3 of stories deals
with poverty in foreign countries as if poverty in Lithuania was irrelevant or not that relevant
for domestic internet audience.
And finally – what can be implications for contemporary media role in public
political communication of democratic societies? Well, globalisations‘ effect can be at least
twofold: on the one hand, as McQuail has noted, because of globalisation media experience
gets decontextualized in respect of location and culture (McQuail, 2010: 254) which might
push dezintegration of civil society as a state‘s political entity. On the other hand, globalisation
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and global free newsflows also has a potential to integrate public into global public sphere, in
which everyone speaks different languages, but share and recognize particular patterns of
thinking let‘s say, about poverty issues. This is a lack in contemporary Lithuanian Digital
public sphere, which didn‘t bring diversity in the discussions about this topic, not in lrytas.lt,
not in 2008, not yet.

References

Beaudoin, C. E., & Thorson, E. (2002). Exploring Reader Interest In International News.
Newspaper Research Journal, 23(4), 46.
Galtung, J., & Ruge, M. H. (1965). The Structure of Foreign News. Journal of Peace Research,
2(1), 64–91. doi:10.2307/423011
Mencher, M. News Reporting and Writing. (5th Edition). Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1984. P.
58-61.
McQuail, D. (2010). McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (6th Edition.). Sage.
News values // Franklin, B ., Hamer, M., Hanna, M., Kinsey, M. Richardson, J.E. Key
Concepts in Journalism Studies. Sage, 2005. P. 173-174
Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2001). What Is News? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism
Studies, 2(2), 261–280. doi:10.1080/14616700118449