Fighting a Losing Battle - Lecture Nine

News values were the topic of this week’s lecture. What makes an article? What engages the audience? Why is it good enough to be in the public interest?

The main concepts I got from Bruce this week was the newsworthiness hypothesis. There are three hypothesis used that help people determine how worthy the news is and if it will attract the audience. They are:

1.       The additivity hypothesis. This states that more factors the news article satisfies, the higher probability it becomes news.

2.       Complementarity hypothesis. This states that factors tend to exclude each other.

3.       The exclusion hypothesis. This states that events that satisfy none or few factors will usually not become news.

To be honest, when I try and think of news that is engaging and draws me in, I can’t determine factors that make it interesting. What I read every day depends on how I’m feeling. If I need life advice, I’ll go to the horoscope. If I’m in a bad mood, I’ll look at the latest tragedies. If I’m in a good mood, I’ll look at celebrity gossip. I don’t know if I quite grasped the meaning of today’s lecture, but I came out pondering about how each person finds different pieces of information engaging and interesting. No one can really determine what is going to engage an audience, because some people are always going to be left out. For example, I really like rocks. Laugh all you want, but earthquakes, lava, volcanoes, and the types of rocks that they all form really interest me. However I rarely see articles about them in the paper.

What I am getting at here is, no matter how hard you try to please everyone and try and analyse what everyone is viewing, someone is always going to miss out. Determining if the news report will be read is hit and miss. People change what they want to read on a daily basis.

So good luck to everyone out there trying to make a people pleasing article. You just can’t win.

Today's picture shows a young boy fighting a losing battle. I thought I'd better explain it, just in case one of you didn't pick up on it and thought I was putting seedy pictures on here...