The Backstory: How we decide what's newsworthy
Thursday, 1 July 2021
The Backstory is an occasional column from Stuff Editor in Chief Patrick Crewdson offering behind-the-scenes insight into stories and newsroom decisions. You can get The Backstory as an email newsletter.
A reader wrote in to ask how Stuff chooses what items we feature. That’s a deceptively simple question.
What we cover – and then what we promote on our homepage, in newspapers, or on social platforms such as Neighbourly – is dictated by how we decide what’s newsworthy.
News value is notoriously tricky to define. In one sense, it’s like art – you know it when you see it.
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Old school journos love this legendary quote (attributed to various authors): News is what someone doesn’t want you to know; everything else is advertising.
There’s plenty of truth in that – holding the powerful to account must be a core value of journalism, and we don’t do our audience any favours if we feed them spin or unfiltered public relations material.
But it also reveals a flaw: the media’s focus on the negative. You’ve probably heard the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads”. Journalism has a bias toward conflict, so drama and carnage often dominate the news agenda. If left unchecked, that tendency can leave audiences with an inaccurate or incomplete view of their world – which is why we have to remind ourselves to show light as well as shade.
Different publications define news differently, depending on their values, mission and audience. To use international examples, the New York Times, Fox News, the Daily Mail and the BBC interpret news very differently. That’s healthy – media outlets shouldn’t be homogenous.
Editors use a mixture of experience, instinct and data to decide what to cover. At Stuff, we’re swimming in analytics about our audience and what they consume, but that data doesn’t make decisions for us – it augments our news judgment.
Stuff is a general interest news and entertainment site. We cover everything from the vaccine rollout to the best streaming TV options; from climate change to cricket; from renovation advice to migrant worker exploitation. When readers who don’t like a particular story hit us with “How is this news?!” or “Slow news day?”, it’s often because they’re applying the standards of hard news to entertainment or lifestyle coverage.
A newsroom isn’t a factory. We can’t fit every story into a uniform box. But if we try to articulate our news values, a potential story should satisfy some of these criteria (the more the better).
Of public interest
Is this something informed citizens have a right to know about? Does it show democracy or the justice system in action? Does this reporting support the wellbeing of New Zealand society?
Interesting to the public
Do people want to know this? News is not the same as gossip, though it shares some qualities.
It’s important to note that being of public interest or interesting to the public are not the same thing. A salacious story of an MP having an affair may be interesting to the public, but arguably it’s only of public interest if it affects the MP’s work, demonstrates hypocrisy, or reveals abuse of power.
Novelty
News should be new. The first person to unicycle the length of the country to raise money for charity? That’s news. The fifteenth? That’s a lovely, altruistic thing to do, but it’s not news.
Related to this, news should be timely. With any given story, there has to be a reason we’re telling you this now.
Impact
Does it affect a lot of people? For instance, an earthquake or extreme weather event, a change to how schools are run, or a cyber-attack at a hospital. Or does it affect a small number of people intensely? Is it a human interest story that will touch readers emotionally, or could it spark them intellectually?
Immediacy
Breaking news is our bread and butter. If police sirens are wailing, our audience expects us to react. Something happening right now will vault up the coverage priorities.
Good news
Constructive stories that show solutions, celebrate success or warm your heart should be part of a balanced news diet (provided we’re not just succumbing to PR puff).
Education
News isn’t just about the events of today. It should help people better understand the world around them – its history and its future. Done well, news will illuminate the big picture about social trends, changes to the way we live, and contentious topics.
Relevance
Does it reflect our audience’s interests, and their everyday concerns?
We reflect what people are talking about and the issues our communities care about. So when we cover Clarke Gayford’s epic birthday cake for Neve, it’s not because we’re shills for the prime minister - it’s because people (parents especially) are interested in birthday cakes, and this one was a talking point.
Public figures
Well-known people, organisations or locations are inherently newsworthy.
Proximity
As a New Zealand media outlet, we focus our own reporting resources primarily on news in Aotearoa New Zealand or involving or affecting Kiwis. We carry international news from partners such as Associated Press, the Washington Post and the Sydney Morning Herald, but what makes the news in the UK, India or South Africa won’t necessarily be news for us.
The sight of it
TV networks can only tell a story if they have visuals. As a multimedia platform, Stuff’s more flexible than that. But sometimes something becomes a story – or earns a place on the homepage – through the sheer power of its photo or video, whether that’s a superb shot of a super blood moon or grainy CCTV footage.
Cracking yarn
Affectionate newsroom jargon for a great story, a “cracking yarn” has an X-factor – you hear it and you’re compelled to tell others. Martin van Beynen’s recent story on the Christchurch woman who had a tiddlywink stuck up her nose for 37 years was a classic example of a cracking yarn.
It’s weird
We have a soft spot for the bizarre, the odd, the unusual. Often these tales will involve animals.
All the news fit to print?
The last point to make is that newsrooms aren’t all-knowing. We can’t and don’t cover everything. But sometimes, if we don’t cover a story, it’s for the mundane reason that we weren’t aware of it, or the equally mundane reason that we didn’t have someone available to do it.
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