Welcome to the Educator Edition of the NPR Public Editor newsletter. We created this monthly installment because we've heard that many of our audience members are journalism and media literacy teachers who use our work in the classroom.
Each installment of this edition will address three themes:
- The Context dives into the subject at hand and why it's an important topic in journalism.
- The Background uses analysis from previous newsletters and Poynter Institute resources to illustrate how a certain issue plays out.
- In the Field gives students the opportunity to apply what they've learned. We'll sum up the topic and provide a handout that you can use in the classroom.
This month's lesson is on newsworthiness. Please let us know if you find it useful in the classroom (or as a friendly discussion guide for your next dinner party). We especially want to know if there's an issue you'd like us to address. You can email us at [email protected] or reach us on social media through Facebook, Instagram or Threads.
Is that story newsworthy?
Before journalists decide whether to cover a story, they must ask a crucial question: Why is this newsworthy?
At the heart of good journalism is relevance to the audience. For a story to resonate with the news consumer, it has to bring value or create impact.
The traditional values of newsworthiness include:
- The information or the developments are truly new, meaning they've come to light in recent days.
- The topic itself is of interest at this moment, meaning it's timely.
- The story itself is relevant to the audience, meaning it is useful.
- The people, companies or events are intriguing.
- The events of a particular story are unusual; this is often called "human interest."
- There is conflict or tension to be resolved.
Audience members should be able to discern why a story is valuable to them. And when it's not obvious, the journalist needs to make it obvious by articulating the promise, either in the headline or early in the story.
More than once we've received comments from audience members asking why NPR would publish a particular story or air an interview. We're using those examples, along with Poynter resources, to demonstrate why it's important that journalists know exactly what value their story brings to their audience and sometimes consider explicitly stating that value.
Last fall, some audience members were incensed that NPR ran a story about a viral moment involving National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry. A frequent guest on The Megyn Kelly Show, Lowry appeared on the Sept. 15 episode, during which he was asked about media coverage of JD Vance's false claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people's pets.
Lowry verbally stumbled between two words, "migrants" and "immigrants," and it sounded to some viewers like he called Haitians the N-word. Accusations spread on X that Lowry had indeed said the slur.
Many news outlets covered the story, including NPR. But a listener who wrote to us questioned the decision to do so, pointing out that the original headline and story were unfair. So, we investigated.
Our team listened to the clip of Lowry speaking many times, and we concluded that he had in fact simply stumbled over the words. We wondered: Why run the story at all? Was it newsworthy to question whether Lowry blurted out the epithet? Or was it only newsworthy if he definitely did so? If the audience cannot easily determine why a story is worth reading or listening to, then there's more reporting to be done.
In the end, we suggested that this story did not meet NPR's standards. It did not definitively state whether or not Lowry had said the N-word. By asking a question and then not answering it, the story didn't bring any value to the audience.
In November, a month after that column, we dug into a Morning Edition interview by Steve Inskeep with Gordon Sondland, a longtime Trump supporter and ambassador who flip-flopped a few times on whether he supported then-former President Donald Trump, but had ultimately decided to vote for him in the 2024 election. We received multiple letters from listeners about its newsworthiness. One listener who wrote to us said this, in part: While Mr. Inskeep did an admirable job live fact-checking Mr. Sondland in this interview, what newsworthy reasons were there to publish this story?
The letter writers wondered if the interviewee was important enough to merit 7 minutes of airtime, and if his ever-changing opinions, or past allegations of misconduct, erased any relevance he might have once had.
Ultimately, we determined that while Inskeep did a solid job delving into the shortcomings in his interview subject's arguments, the audience needed more information about why Sondland's views were worth their time. We could see the merit of exposing the NPR audience to growing support for Trump among those who had previously rejected him. But there was a need for an explanation in the setup for the interview, to clarify why Morning Edition's staff believed Sondland's point of view was worthy of airtime.
And lastly, as students at universities and colleges held protests related to Israel's war with Hamas last year, our inbox flooded with NPR listeners and readers who had questions and critiques about NPR's coverage of such demonstrations.
We found that NPR devoted a significant amount of coverage to the demonstrations at Columbia University, which, for a national audience, didn't seem like the most newsworthy way to approach the topic, especially since protests were happening on campuses across the country. Some of the news stories also mentioned those other protests, but more details would have helped their audience. How many campuses were experiencing protests? What percentage of students on any given campus were participating in the protests?
We spoke with Eric Marrapodi, vice president for news programming, who shared insight on the newsroom's strategy in devoting resources to protest coverage. "When you say this is a group of 300 students protesting, is that automatically clear to the audience that that's not every student in the student body?" Marrapodi said. "Maybe not. Maybe we could do a better job of clarifying and explaining that." He added: "I think our journalists did a really good job describing what was happening at these college campuses. And it's also true that there were things that were not happening at every college campus."
We've reviewed the numerous ways that journalists determine whether a story is newsworthy. And we've made a case that journalists need to describe the journalistic purpose of their work out loud, in the body of the story. Now it's your turn to test your knowledge. We've broken down the components of what makes something interesting enough to the audience to warrant reporting — along with a two-part assignment.
You can download the handout here.
The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Nicole Slaughter Graham and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.
Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute
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