Answer BOTH sections a) and b). The second section should be more substantive.
a) News values are criteria, agreed upon but unquestioned and unexamined, that determine which events, out of the many millions that occur each day, become ‘the news’. Discuss this statement.
b) Select TWO different short news items on different topics from different media (printed newspaper/radio/television/online), published in the past three years. These can be either NZ or international news items and could be, for example, breaking news, celebrity news, political news, lifestyle news or specialist news (such as sports, business, science, or technology). Do not use long-form journalism, feature articles, broadcast current affairs or documentary.
Please provide a copy of each item as a PDF or JPEG if it’s a print or online article, or if it’s available online (any medium), a URL link.
Reflect on the type of reporting in each of the two items, analyse the news values that lie behind them, and describe their similarities or differences.
As a start, questions you may want to answer include:
What is being reported on in each item?
Describe the nature of the content of each (for example, political news, entertainment, sport).
What kind of news values do you think are contained in each item? (Refer to Week 2’s readings). Are the two similar to each other in terms of news values, or different?
Who do you think is the audience for each news report?
Which item do you think would be the more ‘shareable’, and why?
Style and Referencing: Use academic conventions in your writing, drawing on your readings to support your argument within the body of your answer, adding references (footnotes or parenthetical citations), and a bibliography at the end of your essay. We expect two or more academic references. Also cite the news publications and outlets that you are using in your analysis.
