In short, news judgement is the reasoning behind every decision you make as a journalist. Every time you pitch, edit, or approve an article about the article’s importance and newsworthiness, you are exercising news judgement. Both the hardest and the most important part of journalism, news judgement cannot be taught in a classroom or defined by hard policies; it is an instinct learned through experience and from others’ mistakes.

News values

News values are the reasons a story may be newsworthy, or interesting to your reader. Whether or not you’re conscious of it when pitching an article, one or more of these values applies to every interesting story. When you’re considering a new pitch, think of which news values apply, and use that to shape your angle. If none of them apply, look for a different angle or find a new story.

• Timeliness: Some stories are newsworthy because they’re happening right now. Most often, a timely article has at least one other news value, but getting it out quickly still makes it more interesting. People are more likely to read live coverage on Election Day than they are to read an article about the results 2 weeks later.
• Proximity: All news is local. The closer your readers are to something, the more likely they are to care about it. This is why it’s important to find a local angle any time you cover a national or international story. A bus in Arizona crashing is not newsworthy to The Mass Media’s audience, but a campus shuttle bus crashing very much is.
• Impact: People are selfish. They care most about things that will change something about their lives. Readers don’t care about the mundane legislative process that goes into averting a government shutdown, but they care a lot about which government services will be unavailable to them during it.
• Prominence: A bicycle accident with no injuries isn’t newsworthy, but the president crashing his bike definitely is. When it involves a famous, important, or otherwise prominent person, it becomes newsworthy based on that fact alone.
• Conflict: As the old newspaper adage goes, “if it bleeds, it leads.” People want to read about conflict, whether that’s a clash between authorities and protestors, the latest war, a lawsuit or actual violence. As journalists, it’s important for us to write about these topics to keep our readers informed and engaged, but it’s also important to avoid glorifying or sensationalizing them, and to balance them out with lighter stories.
• Human Interest: Sometimes, we need a story that pulls at our emotions. The story about a dog finally getting adopted from the shelter or a feature on a charity helping the community does just that. These are the stories we use to balance out the bad news and conflict.
• Unusualness: Dogs bite people all the time, to the point that “Dog Bites Man” is often used to refer to that story we write 3 times a week in the news industry. If it happens all the time, nobody cares enough to read the article. But have you ever seen the “Man Bites Dog” story? That’s a lot more newsworthy than “Dog Bites Man.” When a story turns the reader’s expectations on their head, it becomes newsworthy.

Ethical Considerations

News values are why a reader might find a story interesting, but the decision about whether to publish something doesn’t end there. You also have to make sure that publishing the story is ethical. Here are some questions you should ask yourself in making this decision:

• Does this story tell my readers something they should know?
• Does this story balance the public’s need for information against all the potential harms of publishing it?
• Are there more sides to this story I need to tell?
  • Consider whether you have talked to enough people to sufficiently verify the facts, and how your own biases played a role in your coverage. Look for any other points of view or possible explanations that you left out. Give everyone involved the opportunity to share their side of the story. Ensure you tell the story in full, historical context.
• Are there really two sides to this story? ****
  • There is only one side to facts. You are under no obligation to — and should not — quote someone spouting misinformation. If there is no agreement on the facts, it is your job to determine and report the right answer. In making this decision, recognize and avoid a bias toward fairness: To steal an example from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, if House Republicans introduce a bill declaring the Earth is flat, you don’t lead with “Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on shape of earth.”