The press release came in from the Member for Bathurst via fax. The office of the Honorable Gerard Martin, our state representative, wanted us to know that they’d purchased two new fire engines for the town and apparently, they thought that a certain grumpy, severely hungover newsroom intern would find this interesting.
They were wrong. But I wrote it into the news bulletin anyway, for two reasons.
Firstly, I was very, very scared of the seasoned journalist who took a sick delight in ruthlessly editing my bulletins in site https://universityofmixology.com/. The only thing worse than giving her too many stories was giving her too few. But secondly, even though I didn’t give two hoots about the fire engines, I knew that our radio audience would.
To our audience, it was newsworthy – there were qualities in the story that made it news. And I knew this because, luckily, I had been far less hungover when I’d been lectured on news values, and why they matter poker idn. While understanding news values may seem trivial, familiarizing yourself with what journalists want can help develop content and SEO strategies.
Understanding news and content values will help you select strong ideas for content marketing, conduct the right research, and better pitch journalists, publishers and webmasters. When your content is newsworthy it can better compete in a sea of content fighting for people’s attention.
Blog links are good. But news links are great. And so very rare and precious, like unicorns.
So how do you hunt those unicorns, kill them swiftly, then turn their skin into a sweet pair of pants and grind their horn into an aphrodisiac?
The secret to getting those news placements is in understanding this news values list: impact, timeliness, prominence, proximity, the bizarre, conflict, currency and human interest. The newsworthiness of a story is determined by these eight guiding principles.
1. Impact
How will this affect my readers’ lives? This is the real guts of the story, and it’s typically the lede that you’ll pitch to a publication. The impact of the story quickly establishes the importance of the piece to the reader. It also inherently explains the consequences of the news itself.
In our fire engine story, for example, the impact of this story was that anyone listening to the radio unlucky enough to suffer a house fire will hopefully suffer less damage because of these amazing new fire engines. It also lets people know that they should keep an eye out for some shiny new fire engines driving around town.
Impact, simply put, is showing relevancy to the people affected by a story or event. The greater the number of people affected, the greater the impact. This value, like proximity, is largely determined by audience.
2. Timeliness
Timeliness addresses the question: Why are you telling me this now?
These shiny new fire engines were…new. What makes something ‘new’ by news standards? It doesn’t mean the story itself has to be new, but some new information has to have come to light that makes the story timely and/or relevant again.
Like the time there was a ‘New Species Of Massive Dinosaur Discovered In Africa.’ Obviously, the dinosaur itself isn’t new, but the discovery is. This could likewise be the case with new analysis or new data from months or even years ago – but it’s important to emphasize what’s new.
