News judgment, news values, and newsworthiness

Judgments made by journalists about what is newsworthy have been explored within the academy for decades, since before journalism studies was even acknowledged to be a distinct field of study. Central to understanding selection decisions is the identification of the values that guide journalists' news judgment in practice and are used by scholars to research patterns of coverage, representation, and absence. Typically, within journalism studies, attention is drawn to the construction of news as a mediated product rather than a natural phenomenon or simple reflection of objective reality. Of the myriad events happening in the world at any given time, only an infinitesimally small proportion will be selected as news, and key to these selection decisions are news values. But news values are neither fixed nor universal. They may differ over time, place, and market, and they must remain subject to critical scrutiny by journalists, scholars, and citizens alike.