A workshop we do for our clients from time to time focuses on helping them understand how journalists make decisions on what is newsworthy and judge the relative weight they should give to the stories they run.
When you read a news website or watch the evening news, it seems as though the stories are presented effortlessly in order of importance.
But when you create corporate content it can be hard to judge what your audience will find important or worth reading.
So knowing the techniques used by the media can help.
There are plenty of pundits online who claim to have distilled news to its component parts. The good ones say broadly similar things, showing that there truly is a universal definition of what is newsworthy.
In our workshops, we talk about the seven key metrics from our experience running newsrooms in Australia.
They are:
Timeliness. Is it new? Is it happening now? Things that are fresh are more newsworthy than things that happened in the past.
Proximity. Does it directly affect you or people you know? Less important things that affect you are more newsworthy than important things that affect people far away.
Consequence. Does it matter? Does it have real impact on its subjects? An event with genuine impact on people is newsworthy.
Conflict. Are there strongly held differing views on it? We seem to be drawn to fights and stories with different sides are innately attractive.
Novelty. Is it unusual or odd? People enjoy hearing about events that gently jar with their own day to day experience.
Celebrity. Is it about someone or something well known? Famous people and places tie us together as a society.
Humanity. Is it about human nature? Does it provide insight into an individual’s behaviour? Does it tell us something about the human condition?
Whether a topic is newsworthy is a balance of these seven factors. Not all factors are in all stories of course—and news media spend hours each day weighing up stories against each other to decide whether one’s ‘consequence’ outweighs another’s ‘timeliness’.
There is one metric that trumps them all however: humanity.
From crime stories to sport, from serious social issues to the absurdities of social media, some stories just say something about the human condition and what it means to be alive.
Consistently in our research, those stories rank highest of all.