"We just write what we think is newsy": an analysis on newsworthiness constructions in Malaysian newspapers

Studies on newsworthiness have developed mainly into two ways of explaining how events become news. These approaches, which have been called object-driven and subject-driven news values, have contributed a lot in the quest for understanding news. Previous empirical studies on news have demonstrated that concepts used as abstractions of social practices, such as newsworthiness construction, suffer either from object-driven news values explanation about newsworthiness that seeks to locate news value in the news events themselves, or from subject-driven news values which see news making as being exclusively concerned with hidden motives that are often unbeknown even to the practitioners themselves. The practitioners are, therefore, forced to explain newsworthiness by invoking contexts that are already known; for example, in terms of editorial decisions based on political, cultural and/or organisational identities which are ‘external’ to immediate empirical encounters, because such identities are compositions of a range of contextual factors. Here, news studies have developed in a way that has created a rift between journalism theory and journalism practice, mainly because many researchers and theorists understand social actions only through modes of abstraction that have become disconnected from the practical intelligence of news making.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Nottingham Trent University

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Othman, SS

Language dc:language

en