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So, how can we create appealing content to encourage target audiences to engage with your organisation’s communications and messaging?
When I’m looking at creating attention-grabbing content, I look back at my previous experience as a journalist and apply what the journalism industry calls “news values” to guide my content writing.
News values are criteria journalists use to determine the ‘newsworthiness’ of a story and whether it’s worth publishing. This is something that can be adopted within your own organisation’s content writing.
There are eight news values journalists use to determine a story’s newsworthiness and whether it’s worth publishing or not.
A story only needs to have one news value to be considered newsworthy, but most stories contain two or more.
These news values include the following: human interest, impact, conflict, currency, unusual, proximity, prominence, and timeliness.
Here’s a quick summary of the news values.
A story doesn’t need to satisfy every news value to be compelling content, it could have one or two to be relevant to readers.
Understanding news values can allow organisations to better plan and create content that aligns with their identity while also being more compelling for their target audience.
Let’s use a hypothetical situation where CoBright has helped the well-known but fictional charity, the Darling Downs Soup Kitchen with an online fundraising platform that has seen a 16% increase in donations over a business year quarter which allows them to feed an additional 170 people in Toowoomba per year.
This would be a great result for any company, and this would be a story worth sharing.
Looking at the above example, what are the news values at play with this story? Prominence with our fictional charity Darling Downs Soup Kitchen. Impact is another news value with an additional 170 people being helped, and Proximity for Toowoomba-based readers.
With these news values, let’s create a narrative hook which can be used for a media release, Facebook post, and corporate EMS messaging:
Media Release intro:
“Since launching their new online fundraising platform, prominent Toowoomba charity Darling Downs Soup Kitchen has been able to increase their operating capabilities to feed an additional 150 people, just in time as more families begin to feel the economic pinch.”
“CoBright” Facebook post:
“It’s been over four months since we had the pleasure of working with Darling Downs Soup Kitchen to develop their new e-Donate online fundraising platform. Since launching the platform, Darling Downs Soup Kitchen has seen a 16% increase in their fundraising income, allowing them to feed more than ever before.”
If we analyse the above examples, I used Prominence with the Darling Downs Soup Kitchen, Proximity by mentioning Toowoomba, and Impact with the numerical figures in both pieces. Using the news values of the story, I have created a narrative hook to encourage readers to read more about the charity, its new fundraising platform or how CoBright helped them achieve such a great result.
Now that you know what the news values are, you will be able to look at your own stories and make compelling content for your website, social media pages or other communications.
As you practise identifying the news values of the latest stories and events, you will be able to identify the ones that are worth sharing and the ones that will just remain good memories.
I encourage you to use the above news values to create your own compelling content for your audience or you could contact CoBright and talk to one of our content specialists about how we can help you tell your story.