ABSTRACT
News has been defined as “the fresh, unpublished, unusual and generally interesting,” with the most important news stories being about something that has actually happened and the least important concerned with something that has merely been said (Randall, 2016, pp. 32–40). Up to a point, perhaps. But for Angela Phillips (2015, p. 5), at least, “there is no objective matter that can be described as ‘news.’” This suspicion that there might be more to the identification, selection, and presentation of news stories than meets the eye has resulted in the publication of a library’s worth of scholarly studies over the past six decades and more. This chapter will consider some of the key thinkers and approaches to be found within this literature on what have become known as news values, before concluding with an assessment of what we think we know about news selection today and some thoughts on that which we might seek to discover tomorrow.
