IDENTIFICATION OF DOMINANT NEWS ELEMENTS

LEARNING OBJECTIVE: Distinguish the dominant news elements in basic news stories.

Just how are these key elements applied in judging the newsworthiness of an event? .

First of all, the newsworthiness of a story depends on the strength or intensity of the news elements it contains - the more intense the elements, the more newsworthy the story.

After gathering material for a news story, you normally find that one or more elements overshadow the others in intensity. These are the dominant elements. This is sometimes referred to as the news peg.

NEWS PEG

A news peg is the most significant or interesting fact in a story. It is featured in the first paragraph, and all other facts revolve around it. In other words, it is a foundation around which you construct the facts of your story.

For just a few moments, put yourself in this hypothetical situation and assume that you are a JO assigned to the Public Affairs Office, NAS Moffett Field, Calif. The facts of the story, for which you have been given the task of readying for a 1400 release to the local media, are as follows:

1. Navy Lt. Humberto K. Libute, son of Mr. and Mrs. Perfecto F. Libute of 2714 Caspian St., Long Beach, Calif., is a pilot attached to Fighter Squadron 24 at NAS Miramar.

2. At 9 am. (always use civilian terminology for civilian media), Lt. Libute took off from the naval air station in a supersonic F-14 'Tomcat" for gunnery practice over the Mojave Desert.

3. At 9:20 a.m., while flying at an altitude of 13,000 feet, Lt. Libute put his plane into a shallow dive and fired a few bursts from his cannon. When he pulled out of the dive a few seconds later, hydraulic warning lights lighted up like a Christmas tree.

4. Lt. Libute fought desperately to control his damaged plane, but had to bail out.

5. Amazingly the Tomcat landed in the desert. The plane's wings sheared off causing considerable damage, but the pilot escaped serious injury. He walked away from the crash, but collapsed from shock and loss of blood.

6. After an emergency blood transfusion and treatment for shock, Lt. Libute is recovering at the NAS hospital. Doctors report that his condition is good.

7. A preliminary investigation into the cause of the accident revealed that Lt. Libute's jet had lost hydraulic pressure.

Now that we know the facts in the story, let us see if we can determine the most dominant elements. Figure 2-1 will help you analyze them. Elements have been classified in degrees of very strong, strong, weak, very weak and none.

As you can see, the elements of immediacy, proximity and oddity are listed as strong. They are dominant elements in this story, with oddity taking a decided edge over the other two. They will be combined in the news peg, which will be featured in the beginning of the story. The news peg for this story could be written as follows:

"A Navy plane was shot down by its own gunfire near San Jose today. The plane, piloted by Lt. Humberto K.Libute..."

As the story is developed, the other facts are introduced to complement or supplement the dominant elements featured in the news peg.

Figure 2-2 lists a few other examples of analyzing dominant elements for the news peg. The first element listed is the strongest. The others, if there are any, are supporting elements.

Note that immediacy and proximity are not listed as dominant elements, unless they actually overshadow the other elements. Immediacy is present in practically every story because the facts must be new to be considered news. Proximity also is present impractically every local story.

Figure 2-1. - Analyzing news elements.