It’s a question that everyone has an opinion on: What motivates the media to pursue a story?
There are millions of potential news stories that happen every day in our world. So, what is it that journalists are after?
When I hear people speak about the topic, they often talk as if the media’s agenda is preset, coordinated and fixated on end results. They make comments like: “the media went on a witch hunt” or “the press hates our industry” or “journalists are corrupt”.
While the media is influenced by a lot of factors – not all of them altruistic – it can be easy for us to make assumptions about what the media wants. It’s also easy for us to forget the media’s primary goal: factually reporting, selling stories and serving the public.
Take the news headlines in Reuters, TASS and Xinhua on a single day (January 7, 2025). All three news wires reported on the earthquake in Tibet, Prime Minster Trudeau’s resignation in Canada and the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Why the similarity in focus for these very different wires? Journalists – no matter their location – are after a common resource: public attention. Yes, there are a whole host of additional influences that guide their work: codes of conduct, personal interests, and political agendas – just to name a few. But at a base level, journalist’s want the same thing: to tell a story that people will read.
So, what is it that makes a story readable?
Relevance – For a story to make a media splash, it must – in some way – hold value to potential consumers: It must connect with their interests or needs. Often, the relevance of a story is marked by its proximity to or impact on news consumers (think about an oil spill changing people’s access to recreation spaces). In other cases, journalists may look to play into the interests of their “target audience” to build relevance. For instance, when writing about the medivac of a seafarer in the Pacific, an Indian journalist might detail how the injured seafarer is an Indian national – and track down the family for reaction to make the story more relatable to their audience.
Timeliness – Any news story needs to be current. Events that are happening now are more newsworthy than events that occurred last year. Audiences, especially today, want the most up to date information. They want something new, and they want to be the first to know. Even if an event happened long ago, it can still be made current by referencing recent developments (think accident investigation report) or commemorations (think anniversary vigil for casualties of an accident). Sometimes, even fresh social media content can reignite a story’s newsworthiness.
Human Interest – People are inherently interested in hearing about human experience. Generally, stories that capture human feelings and observations are more colourful and relatable. Through compelling eyewitness accounts, journalists can piece together sensational stories that tap into an audience’s emotions in a way that cleansed reporting of facts cannot. It’s far more interesting to hear from a seafarer who describes the intensity of heat from 30-foot flames than it is to hear from a local coastguard officer who gives the factual but mundane chronology of the incident. Our fascination with human experience is also one of the reasons that conflicts receive so much airtime in the press. Conflict is made from competing and unresolved human experiences.
Connecting to a Larger Story – People are constantly trying to make sense of the world. With millions of events happening every day, it would be very easy for news stories to seem ad hoc and random. Journalists often create a sense of order and familiarity in their reporting by connecting singular events to larger stories. This sense of “continuity”, as it is sometimes called, also fuels reporting efficiencies as the audience will automatically recognise the underlying context to the story. For instance, consumers understand news agendas where say a politician, CEO or celebrity is being held to account. Events that are part of larger stories are also seen as more important than single headlines. Subsequent developments to these events then sustain to the same narrative.
Novelty – while journalists may look to connect a story with a larger topic or specific audiences, they also want to present something new and unique to their audiences. They look for an angle that hasn’t been covered. Ultimately, like in business, journalists want to gain a competitive advantage over their rivals, often labelling a story as ‘excusive’ – with any fresh perspective, new interview, detail or major development.
Pictures – Humans process visuals faster than words. We can glean more detail from a quick scan of a photograph than from reading a paragraph. Most people also learn best with visuals and retain more of what they see than what they read or hear. The media exploit images for sensationalism of a story by offering a point of emotional connectivity. Taken together, our affinity for visuals give picture stories an impressionable X-factor that plain textual stories fail to achieve.
Recognisable Names – Like fairytale characters in a fable, recognisable brands in the press attract audience attention. Brand recognition offers an entry point into a story – relating audiences to foreign topics in a familiar way. Big names can also raise the profile of the story just by the fact that someone popular, powerful or wealthy was involved.
The media is not (typically) an end-game machine. Anyone who knows the media, knows that journalists are – in their hearts – communicators. They are storytellers and educators. Journalists can’t do their job if they don’t grab attention. Managing media relations ultimately requires managing the attention game.
