Previously in this column, I mentioned news values in a summarized manner under the title "Tendency toward sensationalism in media," yet I couldn't delve into the subject since that week we had an issue of specific news relating to news values. This week though I intend to cover the subject wider than before. Let's start by defining news value. News values concern how much coverage a story entails and how much attention readers or viewers give the story itself. The writer of the book "Broadcast Journalism: Techniques of Radio and Television News" defines news values: "News journalism has a broadly agreed set of values, often referred to as 'newsworthiness.' " The last word actually summarizes the whole thing efficiently. Indeed, news values are the newsworthiness of a story. While the definition is pretty straightforward when it comes to its content, controversy begins.Over the course of years, there were a couple of theories on what makes a story newsworthy. Some relied on the content of the news and some took a more result-oriented approach and based them on the reactions of the audience. Many chose to combine them. Sometimes even the audience decided on a more direct influence and threw their hat in the ring on determining which story should be published or not as was the case two weeks ago. But for a long time, a series of theories by Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge managed to be the most accepted among them. Some I will mention with explanations, but the rest are pretty self-explanatory. Here they are:"Frequency: An event that unfolds within a publication cycle of the news medium is more likely to be selected than one that takes place over a long period of time."Threshold: Events have to pass a threshold before being recorded at all."Meaningfulness: The culturally familiar is more likely to be selected."Consonance: The news selector may be able to predict [due to experience] events that will be newsworthy, thus forming a 'pre-image' of an event, which in turn increases its chances of becoming news."Composition: An event may be included as news less because of its intrinsic news value than because it fits into the overall composition or balance of a newspaper or news broadcast."Reference to persons: News that can be presented in terms of individual people rather than abstractions is likely to be selected."Reference to something negative: Bad events are generally unambiguous and newsworthy."The self-explanatory ones are, "Unambiguity, Unexpectedness, Continuity Reference to elite nations, Reference to elite people."However, the rapid development in media that came with technological advancements led several academics and journalists to think that some of these criteria by Galtung and Ruge became insufficient and void. I do not share this view though. The theories of Galtung and Ruge still carry great weight when it comes to editorial decisions. Helen Caple and Monika Bednarek from Oxford University mention this issue in their paper "Delving into the Discourse: Approaches to News Values in Journalism Studies and Beyond," saying, "While many researchers would claim to be moving on from Galtung and Ruge's position, there is a remarkable amount of similarity both in the conceptualization of news values and in the application and findings of these new approaches."Nevertheless, new categories can and should be added even if they are based on the previous ones since it will help enrich theory and also help journalists. There are new elements that came into play when the Internet and citizen journalism managed to gain quite a big foothold in the sector, something Galtung and Ruge couldn't have foreseen. For example, Professor Judy McGregor stated that "visualness, emotion and conflict" should be added as news values criteria.There are many more to write about: We couldn't even mention the ideas of Tony Harcup & Deirdre O'Neill. Perhaps as Charlotte Ryan said, "There is no end to lists of news criteria." Nevertheless, the rest had to be another week's subject.I would like to emphasize something though. News values are not the same thing as news ethics. By fulfilling the criteria of news values you do not get a free pass from the ethics of journalism. Something many journalists today fail to grasp I'm afraid.