News values and story selection

Every day far more happens than any news organization can cover. Photo editors and photographers constantly decide what to photograph, which pictures to publish and how prominently. Those decisions rest on news values, a set of criteria journalists use, often without stating them, to judge what matters to an audience. This lesson makes those criteria explicit, shows how they apply to pictures in particular, and examines the biases they can hide.

What makes something news

Scholars and editors have described news values in many ways since the 1960s, when the Norwegian researchers Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge published an influential list. The criteria most often cited are these. Impact: how many people are affected and how seriously. Timeliness: whether it is happening now or newly known. Proximity: how close it is to the audience, geographically or culturally. Prominence: whether well-known people or institutions are involved. Conflict: disagreement, competition or violence. Human interest: emotion, unusual personal stories, children and animals. Novelty: the unexpected or first. Consequence for the future: whether it will change things.

For photographs, additional values apply. Visual impact: whether there is something strong to see. Action and emotion: whether people are doing and feeling something. Access: whether a photographer can get there and be allowed to photograph. Exclusivity: whether this picture is one no one else has. A story with high news value but nothing to see, such as a change in interest rates, is hard to photograph; a minor event with spectacular visuals, such as a small but dramatic fire, can win more space than it deserves.

The photo editor's role

Photo editors manage assignments, choose pictures and argue for them in news meetings. At larger organizations a director of photography sets visual standards; at smaller ones a single editor, or a section editor with no visual training, may make all the decisions. Good photo editors combine news judgement with visual judgement. They ask what the story is, what the reader needs to see to understand it, and which picture does that best, not just which picture is most striking.

The daily cycle at a newspaper or digital outlet begins with a planning meeting where editors list expected stories and assign photographers. Breaking news disrupts the plan, and editors must decide whether to pull a photographer off one assignment to cover another. Later meetings decide which pictures lead the website, the homepage, social channels and the print edition. Each decision weighs news value against what was actually captured.

Planning and anticipating stories

Much news is predictable: elections, budgets, trials, festivals, sports seasons, anniversaries and weather. Planned coverage gives photographers time to research, secure access, scout locations and think of pictures that go beyond the obvious. A photo editor's calendar, or budget in newsroom language, lists these events weeks ahead. Photographers who pitch ideas, rather than wait for assignments, add value: they notice stories in their own communities and propose ways to show them.

A useful planning habit is to ask, for every assignment, what the obvious picture is and what a better picture would be. At a budget announcement, the obvious picture is the minister holding the document; a better one might show the people the budget affects. At a festival, the obvious picture is the main stage; a better one might be the volunteers before dawn. The obvious picture still needs to be made, because editors may need it, but the better one is what readers remember.

Bias, blind spots and who gets covered

News values are not neutral. Proximity and prominence favour the powerful and the nearby. Conflict favours protests over quiet progress, crime over community, and disasters over the long-term conditions that cause them. Human interest can turn individuals into symbols. Studies of news coverage in both countries have found that some communities, including Indigenous peoples, racialized groups, rural residents, people with disabilities and people living in poverty, appear mostly in stories about crime, conflict or suffering and seldom in everyday roles. Photographs can reinforce these patterns even when each individual picture is accurate.

Photojournalists counter this by asking whose stories are missing, building relationships with communities beyond the moments of crisis, and checking their own archives for patterns. Some newsrooms audit their photographs, counting who appears and in what roles. Others involve communities in planning coverage. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action, released in 2015, included calls for journalism education on the history of Indigenous peoples, and many outlets have revised their approaches to covering Indigenous communities. In the United States, newsroom diversity surveys and organizations representing journalists of colour have pushed similar changes.

A related problem is parachute journalism: flying in to cover a crisis without knowledge of the place, then leaving. It often produces pictures that are dramatic but shallow or stereotyped. Working with local photographers, fixers and journalists, and crediting them properly, produces better and fairer coverage.

Photographing stories that are hard to see

Some of the most important stories, such as housing costs, climate change, health policy, inequality and corruption, lack obvious pictures. Approaches that help include finding a person whose life shows the issue, photographing the places where it happens, using portraits with strong environmental context, documenting processes over time, and working with data journalists to pair pictures with graphics. The aim is to make the abstract concrete without exaggerating. A single dramatic image of a flooded house can stand for climate change, but it can also mislead if the flood had little to do with long-term trends; captions and accompanying reporting must keep the connection honest.

Selecting pictures for publication

Once pictures exist, editors choose among them. Criteria include news value, accuracy, technical quality, composition, emotional impact, and appropriateness for the audience and platform. An editor must also think about what the picture says beyond the facts: whether it fairly represents the event, whether it dignifies or humiliates the people in it, whether it will be read as taking sides. Choosing a picture of one protester throwing a rock at a peaceful march of thousands may be accurate in a narrow sense but misleading about the event as a whole.

Placement matters too. A picture on the homepage or front page signals importance. Size, cropping and the headline beside it change how it is read. Editors should consider the full package: picture, caption, headline and story together.

Weighing news values against harm

News value sometimes conflicts with other values. A picture of a grieving parent has strong human interest but intrudes on private grief. A graphic image of a dead body shows the reality of violence but may traumatize viewers or the victim's family. A picture of a child may be powerful but expose the child to harm. Editors weigh these factors case by case, guided by ethics codes that ask journalists to seek truth and also to minimize harm. Lessons 9 and 11 discuss these decisions in depth, but they start here, in the judgement of what is news.

Story selection in practice

On a typical day a photo desk might weigh a planned announcement, a breaking incident, a feature idea from a photographer and a long-term project. A useful discipline is to state, in one sentence, what each picture should tell the reader. If that sentence is weak or vague, the assignment probably needs rethinking before anyone leaves the newsroom. If it is strong, the photographer knows what to look for and the editor knows what to expect.

Photographers also contribute to selection through what they file. Sending a short note with the pictures, explaining which frame you think is strongest and why, and flagging anything the editor should know, such as a person who asked not to be identified, helps the desk choose well. Editors value photographers who think about the story, not only the pictures.

News judgement improves with practice and feedback. Compare your selections with what was published, and with how other outlets covered the same event, and ask editors why they chose differently. Over time, the reasons behind good selection become instinctive.