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Media values

Studies of mainstream news media have found that most select stories involving:

• new events or current events
• trouble or conflict
• novelty or rarity
• elite people and groups
• large events
• 'people near us' or 'people like us'
• events that are simple/unambiguous
• personal stories
• stories that are visual or concrete - they have photographs, or can be described in word pictures (so, for example, a storm will trump a story about statistical trends).

These news factors aren't random: we evolved to pay attention to large, novel events involving power and conflict; natural selection probably took care of anyone who didn't.

Understanding these news factors can help you determine how to present a story to reporters, and how much coverage you can realistically expect.

Find out more

The role of news factors in media use (PDF) - paper by German academic Christiane Eilders.