What Makes News? 7 Key Criteria for Newsworthiness

Every day, thousands of events happen around the world. A building collapses in one city, a politician makes a speech in another, a scientist publishes a breakthrough study, and somewhere a dog learns to skateboard. Yet only a handful of these events make the evening news. Why? The answer lies in a set of professional guidelines called news values – the criteria journalists use to decide what is worth reporting and what isn’t. According to scholars, these values are “criteria that influence the selection and presentation of events as published news.” Understanding them doesn’t just explain how newsrooms work – it helps all of us become more informed consumers of media.

The origins of news values 🔗

The formal study of what makes news newsworthy dates to 1965, when researchers Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge published a landmark analysis of how international events were selected and presented in Norwegian newspapers. Their work identified a set of factors – they called them “news factors” – that consistently predicted whether a story would be covered. As journalism educators note, their criteria have held up remarkably well over the decades, even as the media landscape has shifted from print to digital. Today, most working journalists apply some version of the same framework, even if they’ve never formally studied it. It becomes instinct – a gut-check that happens before a single word is typed.

The seven criteria most widely accepted in contemporary journalism are: timeliness, proximity, impact, prominence, the unusual, conflict, and human interest. A story rarely scores on just one. The more criteria it satisfies, the bigger the story.

Timeliness and proximity: the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of news 🔗

Before any other factor comes into play, a story must first answer two basic questions: Is it new? And is it near? These are the entry-level tests of newsworthiness.

Timeliness: news is perishable 🔗

Timeliness refers to how recently an event occurred. As one journalism textbook puts it, the more recent a story, the more interesting it is to readers – the older the information, the less newsworthy it becomes. This is why broadcasters use “Breaking News” banners and why digital news sites publish updates in real time. Information, much like fresh produce, has a shelf life. A traffic accident is news right now; it’s a footnote by next week. This is also why journalists are trained to ask themselves: “What is new about this story today?” Even an old topic can regain timeliness when fresh data, a new development, or an anniversary brings it back into relevance.

Proximity: local impact drives local interest 🔗

Proximity is about location – and it operates on two levels. The most obvious is geographical proximity: events that happen close to an audience’s home are inherently more relevant because they may directly affect that audience’s daily life. The University of Nebraska Omaha’s communications office illustrates this well: research on a state’s new tax code is unlikely to generate interest across state borders. A water main break disrupting traffic in your city is urgent local news; the same incident in a distant country will go unnoticed by most.

But there is also psychological proximity – a sense of cultural or emotional closeness that can override geography. News from a person’s country of origin can feel personally relevant to an immigrant community, even if that country is thousands of miles away. Purdue University’s journalism writing guide captures this through the concept of “relevance”: the closer an event is to the audience’s lived experience – geographically or culturally – the more newsworthy it becomes.

Impact and prominence: scale and influence matter 🔗

Once a story clears the timeliness and proximity tests, the next question is: “So what?” That’s where impact and prominence come in.

Impact: how many people are affected? 🔗

Impact, also called consequence, measures the scale of an event’s effect on people’s lives. As media strategists at Digital Third Coast explain, the greater the number of people affected, the greater the impact – and the greater the news value. A pothole on a side street affects a few dozen drivers; a collapsed bridge on a major highway affects hundreds of thousands. One is a local bulletin item; the other is a breaking news lead.

The most extreme example of impact in modern times is the COVID-19 pandemic. It didn’t affect one city or one country – it had a direct and unavoidable effect on every person on the planet, making it arguably the highest-impact news story in living memory. On a smaller scale, journalism educators use a noisy neighbor complaint as the counterexample: it may matter deeply to the people on one street, but it doesn’t impact most readers – and so it rarely makes the paper.

Prominence: who is involved? 🔗

Prominence reflects the status of the people or organizations connected to a story. Politicians, celebrities, athletes, and major corporations attract more news coverage than private individuals doing the same things. Purdue’s journalism resource offers a pointed illustration: if someone throws a shoe at a random person on the street, it likely goes unreported. If someone throws a shoe at the President of the United States, it becomes international news for weeks. The act is the same; the prominence of those involved is what changes the story’s value.

Wikipedia’s overview of news values notes that Tony Harcup and Deirdre O’Neill updated the original Galtung and Ruge framework in 2001 specifically to include prominence, recognizing that modern news increasingly centers on well-known figures and high-visibility events. The death of a beloved actor or the resignation of a national leader will dominate news cycles in a way that similar events involving unknown individuals simply will not.

The unusual and conflict: weirdness and struggle 🔗

Two of the most viscerally compelling news values are the unusual and conflict. Both tap into something deeply human: our fascination with the unexpected, and our attention to struggle.

The unusual: when normal breaks down 🔗

The unusual – sometimes called oddity, novelty, or rarity – captures stories that break from the expected pattern of everyday life. Journalism educator Owen Spencer-Thomas attributes the classic formulation to 19th-century newspaper editor Charles A. Dana: “If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” The principle hasn’t changed. Events that are strange, rare, or shocking – a person winning the lottery twice, an animal behaving in an entirely unexpected way, a world record that defies belief – carry strong news value precisely because they deviate from what audiences consider normal.

These stories are often described as “soft news.” They don’t carry the weight of a policy announcement or a natural disaster, but they are widely shared and easy to consume. In the digital age, they also tend to perform well on social platforms – which is why “weird news” sections exist on almost every major news website.

Conflict: tension makes for compelling narratives 🔗

Conflict is one of the most consistent and powerful news drivers. As the OER Guide to Media Writing notes, strife and power struggles between large groups – nations, institutions, political parties – grab the attention of large audiences. Stories about war, elections, legal battles, and protests are inherently newsworthy because they involve a clear confrontation with identifiable sides, stakes, and outcomes.

Conflict is also valuable to journalists from a practical standpoint: it creates a natural structure. There is a dispute, there are opposing parties, and there will be a resolution. University communications professionals observe that conflict-driven stories are almost always controversial to some degree – which is precisely what makes them engaging. Even sports coverage draws on this: a championship final is compelling partly because of the conflict between competitors vying for a title. Conflict doesn’t have to mean violence; it can be a debate, a legal challenge, or a community divided over a development project.

Human interest: connecting on an emotional level 🔗

Of all seven criteria, human interest is the most flexible – and in many ways, the most enduring. These are stories that connect with audiences not through scale or status, but through emotion. They appeal to something universal: our capacity for empathy, grief, admiration, and joy.

PR and media firm Axia Public Relations describes human interest stories as a form of “soft news” that serves an important purpose alongside the harder, fact-heavy reporting that dominates news cycles. While a hard news story might report on the scale of a crisis, a human interest story puts a single person’s experience at the center of it – making the abstract feel real and the impersonal feel intimate.

Classic examples include rags-to-riches stories, profiles of people overcoming significant adversity, reunions after long separations, and extraordinary acts of generosity or willpower. Owen Spencer-Thomas points to stories like a dying child receiving a donated organ or families reuniting after decades apart as powerful illustrations of the genre. Wikipedia’s entry on human-interest stories highlights the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning piece “Invisible Child,” which followed a homeless 11-year-old girl in New York – a single, specific story that illuminated a much larger social crisis.

Crucially, human interest stories don’t need to be timely or geographically close. Their power transcends those criteria. Axia PR notes one CBS story published five months after the event it covered, featuring a subject from Brazil – with no meaningful proximity to a U.S. audience – that still gained significant traction because its emotional resonance was so strong. This is what makes human interest stories uniquely valuable: they remind audiences why the news matters at a human level.

Why human interest matters for media literacy 🔗

Understanding the human interest criterion also helps audiences become more critical consumers of news. Scholars have noted that human interest stories can sometimes be used manipulatively – to attract viewership, to frame complex issues through a single sympathetic lens, or to draw emotional responses that override critical thinking. Being able to recognize when a story is leveraging emotion, and to ask whether that emotion is being used to illuminate or to distract, is a core media literacy skill.

How the criteria work together 🔗

In practice, no story scores on just one criterion. The most significant news events tend to hit multiple values simultaneously – and the more they hit, the more coverage they receive. Consider a major earthquake striking a densely populated city. It has impact (millions affected), timeliness (it just happened), conflict (a human struggle against a natural force), and potentially prominence if a well-known figure is caught in it. Add proximity if it struck a nearby region, and you have a story that will lead every broadcast and front page.

Spencer-Thomas observes that some stories – like the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, and major political uprisings – satisfy all eight commonly recognized news values at once. These become the defining stories of their era. But even small, local stories can be compelling when they hit two or three criteria strongly. A local teacher who spent her retirement savings to fund her students’ school supplies has human interest, a touch of the unusual, and strong proximity for a local audience. That’s enough for a front page of any community newspaper.

For anyone learning to read the news critically – or thinking about how information is selected and presented – these seven criteria are an essential lens. They explain not just what gets covered, but what doesn’t. And that absence is often just as revealing as what makes the front page.

What do you think? When you scroll through the news today, can you identify which of these seven criteria are driving the stories that appear at the top? And do you think editors apply these criteria consistently – or does audience demand, revenue, or political influence quietly reshape what gets defined as “newsworthy”?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_values
2. https://pressbooks.palomar.edu/introtojournalism/chapter/chapter-4-newsworthiness/
3. https://www.unomaha.edu/office-of-strategic-marketing-and-communications/public-relations/what-is-newsworthy.php
4. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/journalism_and_journalistic_writing/components_of_newsworthiness.html
5. https://www.digitalthirdcoast.com/blog/values-content-newsworthy
6. https://owenspencer-thomas.com/journalism/newsvalues/
7. https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Southern_Illinois_University/The_OER_Guide_to_Media_Writing/04:_Writing_Straight_News_for_Digital_and_Print_Media/4.01:_News_values
8. https://www.axiapr.com/blog/what-are-human-interest-stories-and-why-are-they-newsworthy
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-interest_story