# How news gets chosen > About seven criteria, mostly unchanged since 1965, decide what becomes a story and what doesn't. The framework editors apply, who runs it now, and why it explains what's wrong with most news diets. Source: https://informed.now/blog/how-news-gets-chosen By Kira Shishkin · May 19, 2026 · News Industry **Summary:** Editors apply about seven criteria, largely unchanged since 1965, to decide what becomes a story: timeliness, proximity, impact, prominence, the unusual, conflict, and human interest. In 2026 audience metrics and algorithms add two more filters on top. What reaches you is what passed the most filters. That's a separate question from what mattered most. The criteria that make a story publishable aren't the criteria that make it worth your attention, and that gap is what's wrong with most news diets in 2026. ### How does news get chosen in a typical newsroom? Each morning, editors meet and review what came in overnight: police scanner traffic, press releases, [**wire copy**](https://informed.now/blog/news-wire-services), social media signals, reporter pitches, and yesterday's metrics. Some stories write themselves: a house fire or a scheduled press conference. The harder work is deciding what gets dropped. A local newsroom covers only a handful of the stories on its desk that day. A national outlet publishes many more. The choices follow a checklist known as news values, news factors, or newsworthiness criteria. Newsrooms weight the items differently, but the shape is shared across the industry. That checklist is what people mean by news judgment: a list, applied under deadline, by humans (and increasingly algorithms) who have run it long enough that it works in the background. ### What are the seven news values editors use? Distilled from a half-century of journalism research, the working list comes down to seven items. Most published stories pass at least one of them, and big stories pass several. - **Timeliness.** News is perishable. Today beats last week, and right now beats both. The 24-hour cycle and social feeds have pushed timeliness from "this week" to "this minute." - **Proximity.** Geographic, cultural, or psychological closeness. A flood three counties over outranks a flood three time zones away, even when the second one is bigger. - **Impact.** How many people are affected, and how deeply. A tax law that changes every household's bill outranks a new stop sign at one intersection. - **Prominence.** A head of state, a large-company CEO, or a major cultural figure elevates an ordinary event into news. - **The unusual.** "Man bites dog" is the canonical example: anything that breaks pattern hard enough to interrupt the day. - **Conflict.** Wars, lawsuits, debates, strikes, primary races. Conflict is easy to write and easy to read, which is part of why so much news is built around it. - **Human interest.** Rescues, survivals, oddities, kindness, suffering. Stories with a face attached. Advanced lists add **magnitude** (events at scale), **continuity** (ongoing stories that demand follow-up), **composition** (the mix an outlet wants that day), **exclusivity** (a story nobody else has), **shareability** (how likely the piece is to travel on social), and **bad news** (which a 2016 UK [**study**](https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1150193) found outnumbered good news in newspaper lead stories). ### Where does the news-values framework come from? The modern list traces to a 1965 [**study**](https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336500200104) by Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, who analyzed how Norwegian newspapers covered foreign crises in the Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus. They found twelve factors that predicted whether an event became news: frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition, and references to elite nations, elite people, persons, and something negative. In 2001 and again in 2016, British researchers Tony Harcup and Deirdre O'Neill ran updated empirical studies that accounted for digital and social platforms. Their 2016 [**list**](https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1150193) runs to fifteen items and still covers the core, some under other names: conflict, bad news, magnitude (impact), the power elite (prominence), and surprise (the unusual). Editors are humans triaging a flood, and the criteria that help them have stayed stable across decades and countries. What's changed is who applies them. ### Who decides what counts as news in 2026? News judgment used to belong to editors, and now it's layered. 1. **Editors and producers** still hold formal authority: they run the morning meeting, set the lineup, and own the front page. 2. **Reporters and assignment desks** shape what reaches editors at all. Which press release to flag, which source to call, which angle to develop: each is its own layer of selection. 3. **Audience metrics** now weigh heavily. Clicks, share rates, time on page, completion rates, and social trending data feed the next morning's meeting. A topic that didn't move yesterday is harder to justify today. 4. **Algorithms** are gatekeepers for many [**readers**](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/). Search engines, social feeds, and recommendation systems decide which stories surface to which audiences, on criteria (engagement, recency, personalization) that differ from a newsroom checklist and often dominate the editor's choice by the time a story reaches you. 5. **Owners and platforms** shape the agenda indirectly. A publication's political slant, a platform's business model, and the regulatory environment set the boundaries editors and algorithms operate within. That's a much thicker pipeline than the 1965 framework imagined. A story clears an editorial bar, an audience-metrics bar, and an algorithmic-distribution bar before it reaches you, and the three don't always agree. [**Curated news vs algorithmic feeds**](https://informed.now/blog/curated-news-vs-algorithmic-feeds) compares the editor and the model head to head. ### Why does important news still get cut? Plenty of consequential stories still never reach a wide audience. The reasons are practical. - **Resources.** A 2021 Pew Research Center [**analysis**](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroom-employment-has-fallen-26-since-2008/) found US newsroom employment fell 26% from 2008 to 2020. When three big stories break at once, one gets undercovered, often the one without an obvious villain or visual. - **Composition.** An editor balancing the day's mix may drop a strong story for a lighter feature or a follow-up to yesterday's coverage. - **Competition.** If a rival outlet has already broken a story, an editor may skip the follow-up, especially under tight resources. Exclusivity is a news value too. - **Audience signal.** Stories that haven't performed get less play, which makes them perform worse, which gets them less play. That loop crowds out slow structural reporting in favor of conflict-rich, emotionally charged pieces. - **Algorithm shape.** If a story doesn't match what the distribution layer rewards (short, surprising, share-friendly), it won't travel, even from a newsroom's own homepage. What gets called news in 2026 is whatever survived these filters, and surviving filters is a different test from mattering most. ### What does this mean for your news diet? Once you see the checklist, your own reading habits get easier to audit. 1. **Does this story score on impact?** Or only on conflict, prominence, and timeliness? Many lead stories are loud without being consequential to your decisions. 2. **Was this surfaced by an editor or by an algorithm?** Editor-curated mixes give you composition; algorithmic feeds give you what you're likely to click. 3. **Am I getting bad news because the world is bad, or because bad news scores higher on the checklist?** One UK [**study**](https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1150193) found bad news was the most common news value in newspaper lead stories. 4. **What's missing from my feed?** Stories that score low on the checklist (slow, structural, distant, no clear villain) still matter and have to be sought out. 5. **How many sources am I trusting?** One source is one application of the checklist. A handful of trusted sources lowers the odds that one editor's blind spot becomes yours. ### How informed.now thinks about news selection We built [**informed.now**](https://informed.now/) in part because the newsroom checklist is optimized for publishing, and your attention needs a different filter. A weekday SMS brief written for adults runs on one question: does knowing this change your day? So we deliberately undercover loud-but-low-impact stories (most celebrity news, most political point-scoring, most outrage cycles) and overcover quieter shifts that affect how you plan a life: policy changes, market signals, scientific results, local context. Every editorial outfit, ours included, has a checklist. The honest version is to [**publish**](https://informed.now/methodology) it. [**SMS**](https://informed.now/blog/what-is-sms-news) news promises curation you can audit: once you can see which criteria a brief uses, you can tell whether it matches your version of "what matters." [**How does SMS news work?**](https://informed.now/blog/how-does-sms-news-work) shows that filter in practice.