ABSTRACT

This chapter considers how news choices are made. It looks at the operational and cultural factors that determine what ends up as headline news, what is relegated to a more lowly position and what gets left out altogether. Trainee journalists may at first find it hard to work out what is considered 'newsworthy'. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to the complex rules that journalists learn to employ in the course of their work as 'doxa'. Some ideological approaches to news construction move in the other direction and come close to seeing a conspiracy at work, in which all editors and journalists are a part of, or are controlled by, the 'power bloc'. Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge isolated twelve 'significant factors' from their study of foreign reporting: frequency; threshold; unambiguity; meaningfulness; consonance; unexpectedness; continuity; composition; reference to elite nations; reference to elite persons; personalization; and negativity.