First step: Audience analysis -- News values
How can you know which story can be interesting to your readers and what they need. In other words, what kind of stories will attract your audience and what kind of stories they can benefit from.
Journalists have relied on news values in selecting interesting and informative news stories. These news values are
timeliness, impact, prominence, proximity, conflict, bizarreness (unusualness) and currency.

1. Timeliness
Journalists stress current information--stories that occurred today or yesterday. If a story occurred even one or two days earlier, they will look for a new angle or development to emphasize in their leads. If some background information is needed, they place it near the end of the story.

2. Impact, consequence or importance of the event
A plane crash that kills 100 is more newsworthy than an automobile accident that kills two.
An increase in the city's property taxes is more newsworthy than an increase in the license fees for fishing because the property tax increase would affect many more residents of the city.
3. Prominence
Stories about prominent individuals, such as their mayor or governor, are more newsworthy than stories about people who play a less important role in civic affairs and who have less power to make decisions that affect your readers' lives.
People like to know about celebrities. People magazine has been phenomenally successful because it is filled with facts and photographs about the lives of famous people.

4. Proximity
Readers are more interested in stories about their own communities than about remote places because they are more likely affected by those stories and because they may know the people, places or issues mentioned in them.
In addition to geographical proximity, there is psychological proximity. Because of communication and transportation development, your readers may extend their scope of interest beyond the local community. Newspapers and TV stations in communities with large Catholic or Jewish populations will give considerable space and time to news from the Vatican or the Middle East.

5. Conflict:
People are influenced by changes. When things are moving smoothly, people may not be interested in them because they are not likely to be influenced by them. People are more often influenced by changes.
* So they are interested in events that reflect clashes between people or institutions.
* People are also interested in disasters and accidents. Two people were killed in an automobile accident is more newsworthy than the fact that thousands of other commuters reached their destinations safely.

6. Bizarre, oddities:

Journalists must be alert for the unusual twist in otherwise mundane stories. If journalists noticed that a person who safely escaped New York City's Trade Center on September 11, 2002, was involved in a fatal car accident next day, it could become a front-page news.

7. Currency:
Like fashion, some things and events become a favorite topic among people during a particular time. The Brown vs. the Board of Education is a popular topic because it is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Nowadays people are talking about Atkins diet and low carbohydrate diet as a new way of losing weight and looking good.
Criticism of news values
Journalists cover events that deviate sharply from the expected and the experiences of everyday life. They prefer a man-bite-dog story rather than a dog-bite-man story. Because of the media's emphasis on the unusual nature of the event, media critics charge that the media give their audience a distorted view of the world. In other words, the media do not accurately portray the life of normal people on a typical day in a typical community.
Editors respond that, because they cannot report everything, they report problems that require public's attention.

Historical changes in the nature of news
Historically, news values have been unequally emphasized. So you need to find out a recent trend: Which news value is more emphasized than others. As a future communicator, you may need to observe your future readers to see their different needs and want, which may be different from those of the current readers.
Emphasized news values have been constantly changing, depending on the target audience and different times.
1. Newspapers in Colonial America served rich and well-educated white males. So they emphasized serious stories about business, politics and foreign affairs.

2. On Sept. 3, 1833. Benjamine Day revolutionized American journalism by publishing the New York Sun. It appealed to workingmen and reported the types of stories that would interest them: crime, sex, sports and hoax stories.

3. Fifty years later, Joseph Pulitzer began to publish the New York World, fight for progress and reform, investigate injustice and corruption, opposed privileged classes and public plunderers, sympathized with the poor and was devoted to the public welfare. In latter days, in competition with Hearst, his newspaper was sensationalized.

4. Journalists continued to modify their definitions of news during the 1970s and 1980s. To help their readers lead more comfortable and enjoyable lives, they began to publish more expert advice, consumer news, and what-to-do and how-to-do-it articles.