<aside> ⌛ Estimated student time on platform: 35 minutes (+ blending)
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<aside> 🗣 Lesson host: N/A
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<aside> 1️⃣ Difficulty level: 2 (for middle school, high school and higher education)
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<aside> ✔️ Assessments: 6 total — students curate a news site homepage (Teachers assess student responses as a whole)
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<aside> 🗒️ Standards: This lesson has Common Core, ISTE, C3 and state-specific alignments. Find your standards in the Checkology alignments dropdown menu to learn more.
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Learning objective(s):
Essential questions:
Background:
Because newsworthiness is such a nuanced topic, encompassing many shifting factors and involving subjective judgments by different people in a variety of contexts, it can be difficult to give students a comprehensive understanding of it. We use factors we call the “Big Four” — timely, important, interesting and unique — because they are general enough to be reasonably comprehensive, yet simple enough for students (especially those new to the subject) to understand and build on. But there are two more factors that journalists often use to make news judgments: proximity and audience.
Clearly the proximity of an event can have an effect on its newsworthiness. This is highlighted in this lesson by the presence of two stories about accidents in the 20-story lineup (the “news budget”) that students are asked to narrow to five top stories. One is about a ferry accident in the Mediterranean Sea that has likely resulted in 130 fatalities, and another is about a local warehouse fire that claimed five lives. If audience and proximity were not part of students’ considerations of the importance of these stories, then the report about the ferry accident would certainly be more newsworthy. But since local audiences care more about things that happen close to them, the warehouse story is arguably, for a variety of reasons, bigger news.
But while proximity and audience are certainly factors that journalists consider every day, they do not stand alone as major factors the way that the “Big Four” do. Rather, they tend to act as subfactors: In some cases, proximity and audience are part of judging importance; in others, they are part of judging interest. Often, they are part of gauging more than one of the major aspects of newsworthiness.
It is up to you whether you want to introduce these two additional factors as concepts that might help students rank stories’ newsworthiness in a more meaningful way.
Whatever you decide to do about proximity and audience, you should note that this lesson offers additional opportunities to explore the tensions and subtleties of news judgment. The ferry and warehouse stories highlight the tension between raw impact (130 lives vs. five lives) and personal impact (distant disaster vs. local disaster). The inclusion of positive stories in this lesson can fuel a discussion about whether journalists should include this as a factor in their judgment of top stories. Should they consciously ensure that the most visible news reports are not all negative, or should they provide the public with the biggest stories regardless of how negative or positive they are?
(This raises a related question about the extent to which journalists can or should concern themselves with the overall impact of a collection of stories. Is it fair to conclude that a selection of news reports sends its own message — in this case, about the negativity or positivity present in the world? Can or should journalists concern themselves with the larger meanings that various consumers might perceive in a selection of stories? Should journalists consciously work to combat damaging or inaccurate stereotypes, or would that make them activists? Should top stories always be a blend of certain types of stories — international, national, local, human interest, etc. — or does this depend on each day’s news?)
Finally, you should note that by requiring students to make actual news judgments of their own, this lesson forces them to exclude several compelling, highly newsworthy stories from their list of top stories. This highlights the importance of having students experience key news literacy concepts the way journalists do — answering the question “How should this be done?” — to help sharpen students’ insights and critiques as readers, viewers and listeners.
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