State of the art of news value (part one)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents a state-of-the-art review of news value studies based on five Brazilian and international peer-reviewed journals highly ranked in the Capes Qualis system, as well as on the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. We conducted a detailed examination of 64 works—including doctoral theses, master’s dissertations, and journal articles—published between 2016 and 2021. The findings indicate the need for a second stage of research grounded in database analysis, which is the continuation of this broader project on news value studies in Brazil and worldwide. Our review shows that the academic debate has not taken into account the cultural dimension embedded in communities of meaning or in journalistic cultures. The proliferation of news value lists appears to be a global phenomenon. Although international articles acknowledge the distinction between news values and newsworthiness, they do not differentiate values from factors, and the division between intrinsic and extrinsic elements is generally considered irrelevant. Only 25% of Brazilian theses and dissertations include a literature review, compared with 100% of the international articles analyzed. The main authors referenced in Brazil are Gislene Silva (1985), Mauro Wolf (1995), and Nelson Traquina (2005), whereas outside Brazil the key references are Galtung and Ruge (1965), Eilders (1997, 2006), Harcup and O’Neill (2001, 2016), and Bednarek and Caple (2017). Content analysis emerges as the most frequent methodological approach both in Brazil and abroad.