Are All News Created Equal? Even Types’ Two-Fold Impact on News Selection

News value theory has undisputed merit and explanatory power, but has been criticized by practitioners and scholars on various grounds, particularly its detachtedness from self-experienced reality of news work, which emphasizes how journalists start with categorizing news, e.g. as “routine”, “scandal” or “accident”; as “hard” and “soft”; as “continuing”, “developing” or “spot” news, choosing the pathway and professional routine for further examination of the story’s potential. Our study integrates both views: (1) news criteria matter for news emphasis decisions, but (2) which news criteria (NC) are how important for which potential news story (PNS) may depend on how journalists categorize the PNS. Based on content analysis data, we captured the “event type” that was the occasion for 34 325 released news stories (RNS). We distinguish 12 event types in an exploratory procedure based on the literature about news routines, open for further development. The data show that event types differ in their newsworthiness, but also in how news criteria affect newsworthiness. Hence, not all types of news events are treated equally, but the categorization into event types shifts the mode of evaluating newsworthiness. This integrated view is not only of theoretical significance, but improves predictions of news emphasis substantially.