Think of a story you remember seeing on the news: the last presidential election, the fight against COVID-19 or hurricanes or tornadoes making landfall. Usually, we remember big stories people talked about for a long time. We remember these stories because they were newsworthy. 

But even the small stories that never become news around the world can still be newsworthy. What matters is that these stories are important to our community. As a journalist, it’s your job to come up with story ideas that affect your community.

After watching this video you should be able to:

• Describe news values and why they make a story newsworthy 

• Identify news values present in stories

• Explain why news values are important to news story telling

• Evaluate stories for newsworthiness, and rank stories from least to most newsworthy 

• Identify places to look for story ideas

• Generate newsworthy story ideas that affect your community