Constructive journalism is a response to increasing tabloidization, sensationalism and negativity bias of the news media today and offers an add on to both breaking and investigative journalism.
Going beyond negativity in the news
Constructive journalism aims to go beyond the negativity bias of the current news culture. Professor Johan Galtung wrote a paper 1965 listing 12 criteria, which seemed to be present in order for an event to be considered newsworthy. One of the most dominant was “reference to something negative”.
As Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University stated in 2013: “The most cited work on news value has been that of Galtung and Ruge … Most of the research since the 1960s … has used Galtung and Ruge as the starting point.”
In an interview with Constructive Institute Galtung clarified “Our work from the early 1960s was meant to be a warning of the consequences for the way news media filtered the world. I was saying, what you do is incomplete. You are missing a major part of the image of the world.”
“Our work from the early 1960s was meant to be a warning of the consequences for the way news media filtered the world.”
Read an article about Galtung’s thoughts here.
