How do your news values differ from those of the professionals who determine which stories get top billing in the mass media each day? Do they differ at all?
It would take a full-blown scientific study to come up with definitive answers to those questions. But maybe, thanks to the interactivity of the Internet, we can at least shed a little unscientific light on the subject through this column.
Here’s your chance to be the editor on a hypothetical news day by exercising the same news judgments MSNBC editors and producers make every day, as they discuss the stories that should appear on the cover of the site. Pick a “lead” article the most important news of the day, which will receive top billing and four others for your version of the MSNBC cover from the 10 stories summarized on the next page. Then compare your choices with those of a group of MSNBC.com staff members who work together to produce this site. Journalists, software developers, marketing specialists and other non-editorial staff recently evaluated the same summaries as part of a workshop conducted under the auspices of the Committee for Concerned Journalists. (Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, CCJ is a consortium of some 1,500 reporters, producers, publishers, owners and academics worried about the future of the profession and promoting a national conversation among journalists about the principles that set their work apart from other forms of communication.)
The workshop exercise was meant to stimulate discussion about news values, not to mirror a typical news day. Some of the 10 stories are completely fictional; others are based on real events that may have occurred over a number of days. You’ll have to vote on your own choices in order to see how and why the MSNBC.com staff made their selections. And for now, you won’t be able to see how other readers voted ” the purpose is for you to see how your values compare with those of MSNBC.com’s staffers, not how they stack up with any self-selected group of readers who choose to respond. I will write a follow-up column next month on the collective results along with any comments that readers care to send me via email, at ombudsman@msnbc.com.
The only changes I’ve made in the text of these summaries are to clarify content partnerships that would be familiar to the MSNBC.com staff, but not necessarily to all readers.
Click here to link to the story list.
