News values

How does a journalist or an editor decide which news is worthy and which is not? According to some media researchers, they refer to a set of news values. One of the best known lists of such news values have been supplied by Johan Galtung and Marie H. Ruge. An analytical discussion on news values always refers to this list, which initially intended to cover international events. These factors include: 1- Frequency 2- Threshold 3- Unambiguity 4- Meaningfulness 5- Consonance 6- Unexpectedness 7- Continuity 8- Composition 9- Reference to elite nations 10- Reference to elite people 11-Reference to persons 12- Negativity. The current research collected 303 headlines from the front pages of four widely circulated Iranian newspapers: Hamshahri, Keyhan, Shargh and Iran. Out of these headlines, 426 news were distinguished and considered. As such, results show that the factors like reference to elite people (F10) and consonance (F5) play main role in Iranian press. Further Iranian press do not focus on Galtung and Ruge’s news values although, in general, headlines possess one or more of above factors. However, two factors (F10 and F5) show that Iranian press follow traditional process in news selection.

As the aftermath of globalization and the increased demand for localized information, translation assumed a significant position in the world of news. Due to this close connection, in recent years, journalistic concepts such as gatekeeping and framing contributed towards much interdisciplinary research in the field of translation studies. Nevertheless, many other topics have remained untouched by translation scholars, one of which is the seminal concept of news value manifested in the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of news products. Exploring news values and their relation to translation offers potentials for a better grasp on the nature of translated news and the process of news translation in newsrooms worldwide. Consequently, the headlines of 120 translated news pieces related to two international conferences were analyzed using Bednarek and Caple’s (2017) discursive news value analysis framework. These news headlines were published on four renowned Iranian news websites from 2021 to 2023. The results revealed that these websites construct similar patterns of news values and establish eliteness, negativity, and superlativeness more than other news values in their translated headlines. This was an indication of the lack of originality among news websites in reporting international events and also their orientation toward following a predetermined ideological positioning. As a whole, the present research is a true interdisciplinary one attempting to learn about the construction of news values in the context of Iran and translation discourse and unveil news agencies’ motivation in linguistically constructing and establishing these values.