As a journalist, your primary job is to find information that is interesting, relevant, and important to your audience. Not every event is news.
To help you decide what to report on, follow this step-by-step route. It’s based on the article ‘Assessing news value’, which we suggest you read before using the checklist below.
How to determine if a story is news:
- [ ] Check for impact: Ask yourself how many people are affected by the event. The more people it touches, the bigger the news.
- [ ] Look for conflict: Stories often involve a struggle, a disagreement, or a problem that needs a solution.
- [ ] Measure timeliness: News must be new. If an event happened a week ago and everyone knows about it, it is no longer news unless there is a fresh development.
- [ ] Identify proximity: Many people care more about what happens in their own street or town than what happens on the other side of the world.
- [ ] Seek out prominence: Actions involving well-known people, such as leaders or celebrities, are often more newsworthy than those involving unknown individuals.
- [ ] Find the unusual: If something happens that is out of the ordinary or breaks a pattern, it is likely to be of interest to your readers.
- [ ] Ensure currency: Some topics become news because they are already being talked about by the public. Follow the current trends in your community.
- [ ] Look for human interest: Find the emotional angle. Stories that touch the heart or show how people deal with challenges are very powerful.
- [ ] Use the “so what” test: Ask yourself why the reader should care. If you cannot answer this, the story may lack the necessary relevance.
- [ ] Verify the evidence: Ensure the story is based on facts that you can prove. News must be accurate and never based on gossip or unsourced rumours.
Learning to spot the difference between an everyday event and a genuine news story is a skill that will sharpen with every day you spend in the field.
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