[ecrea] cpf - What’s (the) News? Values, Viruses and Vectors of Newsworthiness

CALL FOR PAPERS: What’s (the) News? Values, Viruses and Vectors of 
Newsworthiness

13-14 December 2018

Third biennial conference of the Brussels Institute for Journalism 
Studies (BIJU)

Department of Applied Linguistics / Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium

Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2018

Contact: (whatnews /at/ vub.be)

PLENARY SPEAKERS

Monika BEDNAREK (University of Sydney, Australia)
Tony HARCUP (University of Sheffield, UK)

Steered by what Kovach & Rosenstiel describe as our ‘awareness 
instinct’, exchanging ‘news’ fulfills basic human needs for information, 
orientation, and connection. The entanglement of ‘news’, understood as 
recent and current public information, and the development of journalism 
(as a profession), renders the question what ‘is’ or ‘becomes’ news 
highly relevant for the study of journalism. One particularly 
influential approach to ‘newsworthiness’ in journalism studies emerged 
from Galtung and Ruge’s 1965 seminal study on ‘news values’ in (foreign) 
news reporting. The core question of this study was which criteria 
journalists apply in the news selection process. The authors contend 
that (negative) events having to do with conflict, elites or change in 
the daily lives or the immediate environment of the audience are likely 
to become news. Especially if they have some magnitude and if they are 
recent, unexpected and/or if they can be linked to individual people. 
Since then, numerous scholars taking sociological or critical cultural 
approaches to ‘news values’, and selection and journalistic routines in 
general, have revisited their ideas, and refined and complemented them.

These insights have been applicable to a lesser or greater extent 
throughout the whole history of journalism, yet, the digital era and the 
advent of social media more specifically have altered vectors – 
understood both as agents and carriers – of newsworthiness 
significantly, reshaping how ‘news’ is conceived, the way it comes about 
and is exchanged. Within a networked, globalized environment, the range 
of sources that are available to journalists or that are able to trigger 
‘news’ on a day-to-day basis has expanded considerably, while a plethora 
of newcomers (e.g. citizen journalists, alternative, grassroots and 
partisan media outlets) in or at the margins of the journalistic field 
challenge traditional conceptions of ‘newsworthiness’, as well as the 
relationship between ‘journalism’ and ‘news’ per se (e.g. in ‘slow 
journalism’ and ‘constructive journalism’ movements). Even if the 
position of these newcomers along traditional news media’s status as 
primary definers of ‘the news’ may still be subject to debate, it is 
hard to deny the impact of digitization and social media on contemporary 
audiences’ daily ‘news diet’.

Amongst others, search engines, (automated) news aggregators, and social 
media platforms, and their underlying algorithms, have become key to 
understanding how news emerges and circulates nowadays. Social media 
allow to register which stories are clicked, liked or shared most and 
thus to examine which topics and approaches raise the highest interest 
of the audience. Journalists are expected to develop a feeling for 
‘shareability’ and to produce texts and visuals which will ‘go viral’. 
The focus in the selection process seems to have shifted ever more from 
what journalists deemed fit to publish towards what the audience is 
expected to appreciate most. Moreover, as clicks, likes and shares are 
monitored automatically, news stories which receive the most attention 
of readers are moved up higher in the news flow, so that they are picked 
up even more often. This presentation process often happens without 
human intervention, thus leaving the selection entirely to the 
appreciation of the audience. Furthermore, these developments have also 
led to highly customized news packages – ‘me media’ – and the related 
issues of the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’.

However, it is still the journalist (or is it the ‘news worker’) who 
decides what shape the story will take and which aspects will be 
accentuated. The topic of news values can therefore also be approached 
from a linguistic/discursive side. The main question then is how news 
workers construct an event as interesting or relevant, i.e. how they use 
language to make certain events newsworthy, especially on the internet 
media platforms. And taking into consideration the importance of visual 
resources on these platforms, an analysis of verbal text will in many 
cases have to be replaced by or complemented with a multimodal analysis.

We invite participants to engage in a critical discussion of 
newsworthiness. Possible questions which can be addressed are: are there 
topics which are newsworthy by nature, which elements arouse most 
interest in human psyche, which stories and/or sources do journalists 
and their audience find worth sharing, how do news values vary between 
media types and news beats, how can journalists or news workers 
construct issues or events as interesting, what is the relation between 
newsworthiness and publishing platforms.

Inspirational literature:

Bednarek, Monika & Helen Caple (2017). The Discourse of News Values: How 
News Organizations Create 'Newsworthiness'. New York: Oxford University 
Press.

Harcup, Tony & Deirdre O'Neill (2017). What is news? News values 
revisited (again). Journalism Studies, 18 (12). pp. 1470-1488.

We welcome submissions from all relevant disciplinary backgrounds 
approaching topics including but certainly not limited to:

·         News values in the selection of news

·         News values in the production of news

·         The linguistic or multimodal construction of an event as 
newsworthy

·         The relation between publishing platforms and newsworthiness

·         What makes news ‘go viral’

·         Algorithms and automation in the presentation of news

·         Methodological approaches to the study of newsworthiness

We welcome both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and analyses 
at process, product/text, and/or audience level.

All papers will be published (after the authors’ consent) in the 
electronic proceedings of the conference and we are planning to publish 
a selection of the papers in a volume and/or a special issue.

Junior researchers are warmly invited to participate.

The venue for the conference will be the Royal Belgian Institute of 
Natural Sciences (https://www.naturalsciences.be/en) Vautierstraat/Rue 
Vautier 29, 1000 Brussels, near the Brussels-Luxembourg station, a 
lively neighbourhood with lots of hotels and restaurants.

Conference fee (including pre-conference reception, lunch, coffee):

€ 150 (regular participants), € 75 (PhD students).

Dinner will be organized on Friday 14 December and charged separately.

Please send a PROPOSAL of no more than 300 WORDS (excluding selected 
references) together with your affiliation and a short biography (c. 100 
words) to (whatnews /at/ vub.be) by 30 JUNE 2018. Decisions will be announced 
by 15 August. Questions about any aspect of the conference should be 
addressed to (whatnews /at/ vub.be).

For UPDATES on the practical organization, please CHECK our 
WEBSITE: http://www.vub.ac.be/en/events/2018/whatnews

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