ABSTRACT
Jack katz’s explanation of crime newsworthiness differs significantly from those advanced by both Steve Chibnall and Yvonne Jewkes. Chibnall, for example, uses ethnographic methods to deconstruct crime news and identify its component parts, locating crime reporting within the wider context of press ideology and the political economy of news production. Whilst ‘novelty’ had been identified as a key determinant of crime newsworthiness in a number of studies, with Stuart Hall et al. elevating it to the status of ‘cardinal news value’, Katz offers a different interpretation. Crime news may be the best contemporary example of what Durkheim had in mind. The reading of crime news is a collective, ritual experience. There is a fundamental, historical difference between the social meanings of contemporary crime news and those of the public ceremonies of labelling deviants that Durkheim had in mind and that Kai Erikson documented in his celebrated book on seventeenth-century Puritans.
