There was a long Twitter discussion the other day on the incessant demand for novelty in TV history. This tweet rather sums it up:

As a history TV doc development bod, every pitch I wrote had to answer 2 questions: “why now?” and “what’s new?” – novelty and topical relevance often played a big role in commissioning. The novelty can sometimes be exaggerated to get the commission, and again to boost ratings.

— Greg Jenner (@greg_jenner) April 8, 2018

It struck me that this isn’t so dissimilar from some things you find in TV news. And ‘news values’ have been a subject of scholarly inquiry going back to a 1965 study by Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge which I remember reading as an undergrad.

This work and the subsequent debate is synthesised in plenty of textbooks (Brighton & Foy’s News Values, from which I paraphrase some of the below, is a decent starting point). Galtung and Ruge focused on newspapers. Their work predates rolling TV news and the internet, but nonetheless the idea that there are ‘news values’ remains compelling.

G&R came up with ten key values: relevance, timeliness, simplification (i.e., can it be described in straightforward terms), predictability (could it have been foreseen), unexpectedness, continuity (i.e., it continues an existing story), composition (works for the particular outlet), elite people (celebs), elite nations, negativity (bad news is good news). Later studies (focused on TV) noted the importance of pictures to that medium.

The list has been much debated, but I don’t think it’s hard to see how one might use it as a starting point to explore a set of ‘TV history values’ (or indeed a wider set of popular history values). There is certainly an elite of historical personalities whose lives are disproportionately covered, likewise nations. The ‘composition’ value works too: programmes need to fit the outlet’s style. Timeliness produces the demand for novelty: this is all-new research that we need to cover now!

Photo by David at Flickr.