Some People's Children

Welcome to yet another session of Lets Talk IMC. This week in my Media and Culture class I was giving a presentation on what makes a story “Newsworthy” and I realized that the information is of the likes that would be both interesting and useful to the public at large. So, in this weeks post I bring to you the factors for a newsworthy story.

So what does newsworthy mean? Well, according to dictionary.com it is something sufficiently interesting to be reported in the news. So back to what makes a story newsworthy. Well, there are 12 factors:

¤ Timeliness


¤ Proximity


¤ Exceptional quality


¤ Possible future impact


¤ Prominence


¤ Conflict


¤ Number of people involved or affected


¤ Consequence


¤ Human interest


¤ Pathos


¤ Shock value


¤ Titillation component

For a full description of what each one click here.

One of the most common factors that you see all the time in news stories is exceptional quality. It’s a story that has some element that is so out of the ordinary or weird or amazing, that the news has to report it. This usually goes hand and hand with shock value (how shocking a story is).

For example of a story with the previously mentioned factors, this past Halloween in Aiken, South Carolina a woman was walking down the street when she saw two boys she recognized. When she approached the boys she jokingly said she was going to steel their candy. Check out the video to see what happened.

!0 year old pull a gun on a woman after candy theft joke 

Well that wraps up another week of Lets Talk IMC. Thanks to all our soldiers who fight for us so we can live our everyday lives in freedom. Thank you