The present study aimed at comparing the news values constructed to enhance newsworthiness in English and Arabic science journalism. Whether in the form of specialized science magazines like Daily Science or specialized science sections in daily newspapers, science journalism is the source from which the public obtain  most of their science information (Hyland, 2010). It, thus,  represents the principal genre  of science popularization. Also labeled popular science, science popularization refers to "science writing for the general public" (Calsamiglia, 2003, p. 139). Popular science discourse can be produced by the scientists themselves or science journalists (Myers, 2003).

            Science journalism has been the focus of numerous discourse studies that have investigated the various strategies adopted in the process of transforming or recontextualizing specialized scientific knowledge to the lay public. To elucidate such strategies, one approach of discourse studies focused on comparing the rhetorical and/or linguistic choices in scientific research articles and popularizing articles, (e.g., Fahnestock, 1998; Hyland, 2010; Myers, 1991). Discourse studies have also been concerned with the strategies of science popularization in languages other than English, e.g., Spanish (Calsamiglia & López Ferrero, 2003; Calsamiglia & van Dijk, 2004), French (Moirand, 2003), and Brazilian Portuguese (de Oliveria & Pagano, 2006). Recently, this line of research has been concerned with the discourse strategies adopted in online popular science, especially science blogs (Luzón , 2013). Of all these researchers, it is only Hyland (2010) who has addressed news values, albeit indirectly. Only very recently has discourse research started to pay some attention to news values in science journalism (Molek-Kozakoweska, 2016, 2017).

            In the remaining sub-sections of this introduction the definitions given by linguists to news values are presented, followed by a review of the relevant literature including the originating study, the communication and linguistics research of news values. Then, the discursive news values analysis (DNVA) approach and the studies that have adopted it are presented.

News values: Definition

            Linguists have defined news values in various but related ways. For Bell (1991), news values are the "values by which one 'fact' is judged more newsworthy than another" (p. 155). Van Dijk (1988) views news values as located in the "social cognition" and defines them as "values about the newsworthiness of events or discourse. . . . [which]  provide the cognitive basis for decisions about selection, attention, understanding representation, recall, and the uses of news information in general" (p. 119).  News values for Fowler (1991) are a "complex set of criteria of newsworthiness; so news is not simply that which happens, but which can be regarded and presented as newsworthy. These criteria . . .  are said to perform a 'gatekeeping' role, filtering and restricting news input" (p. 13). All these definitions indicate the significance of news values in the news process. The definition adopted in the present study is the one presented by Bednarek and Caple (2014), which reads as follows: "News values are . . .  the ‘newsworthy’ aspects of actors, happenings and issues as existing in and constructed through discourse"  (p. 137, emphasis in original).

News values: Originating study

            The work which is considered seminal in news values research is that of Galtung and Ruge (1965). Based on examining the coverage of three international crises in four national newspapers in their own country, Norway, these two social scientists presented an inventory of twelve "news factors" representing the criteria of selecting which "'events' become 'news'" (Galtung & Ruge, 1965, p. 65, emphasis in original). The authors compared the events under consideration for news reporting to radio wave signals, and, using this analogy, they explained the factors and the properties of events.

Galtung and Ruge (1965) classified the news factors into two major categories: culture-free (the first eight factors) and culture-bound (the last four ones). The factors are listed and explained briefly below. All explanations are those of  Galtung and Ruge (1965, pp. 65-68, all emphasis in original).

1. Frequency:  [The frequency of an event] refer[s] to the time span needed for the event to unfold itself and acquire meaning. . . . The more similar the frequency of the event is to the frequency of the news medium, the more probable that it will be recorded as news by that news medium.

2. Threshold:   There is a threshold the event will have to pass before it will be recorded at all

[The more intense the event], the bigger the headlines it will make.

 3. Unambiguity: An event with a clear interpretation, free from ambiguities in its meaning, is preferred.

4. Meaningfulness: [A meaningful event is one which is] 'interpretable within the cultural framework of the listener or reader' . . . there has to be cultural proximity. . . . The other dimension of 'meaningful' is in terms of relevance: an event may happen in a culturally distant place but still be loaded with meaning in terms of what it may imply for the reader or listener.

5. Consonance: The more consonant the signal is with the mental image of what one expects to find, the more probable that it will be recorded as worth listening to.

6. Unexpectedness: The more unexpected have the highest chances of being included as news. . . [And] by 'unexpected' [is] simply mean[t] essentially two things: unexpected or rare. . . . Events have to be unexpected or rare, or preferably both, to become good news.

7. Continuity: Once something has hit the headlines and been defined as 'news', then it will continue to be defined as news for some time.

8. Composition: The desire to present a 'balanced' whole—[a balance of stories of different kinds across a newspaper or news programme]

9. Reference to elite nations: The more the event concerns elite nations, the more probable that it will become a news item.

10. Reference to elite people: The more the event concerns elite people, the more probable that it will become a news item.

11. Reference to persons: The more the event can be seen in personal terms, as due to the action of specific individuals, the more probable that it will become a news item.

12. Reference to something negative: The more negative the event in its consequences, the more probable that it will become a news item.

It is important to note that Galtung and Ruge (1965) have emphasized that the news factors are interrelated rather than "independent of each other" (p. 71). Concerning the operationalization of the factors, they have provided the following two hypotheses which are relevant, especially the second one, to the linguistic analysis of news worthiness. First: "The more events satisfy the criteria mentioned, the more likely that they will be registered as news (selection). [Second:] Once a news item has been selected what makes it newsworthy according to the factors will be accentuated (distortion)" (p. 71, emphasis in original). This accumulative effect of factors will result in producing a world image in news stories that may not be the same as what happens actually.

            The publication of Galtung and Ruge (1965) has inspired an extensive line of research on newsworthiness by communication scholars and, to a less extent, linguists. In subsequent research, the news factors have been referred to as news values, and for most researchers, as indicated by Bednarek and Caple (2017), the two terms are synonymous.

News values in communication research

            Communication scholars have had two different stances towards Galtung and Ruge's approach. On the one hand, the latter's  study has been considered the "most influential explanation" of news values (McQuail, 1994, p. 270), and one that provided the earliest systematic definition of newsworthiness (Palmer, 1998, p. 378). On the other hand, several critiques have been addressed to the same approach. Harcup and O'Neill (2001) considered the news values listed by Galtung and Ruge (1965) as "hypothetical" and "limited to the reporting of foreign news" (p. 26). Brighton and Foy (2007) pointed out to the out-datedness of Galtung and Ruge's  (1965) model, especially if seen against the changing climate of the twenty-first century media, e.g., live coverage in broadcast media and the "digital converged media forms" (p. 5).

            These critics, however, have not called for discarding the Galtung and Ruge's (1965) framework, but rather for developing its central elements to produce one which is workable for the twenty-first century media. Harcup and O'Neill (2001) put forward what they called a "contemporary set of news values based on the findings of empirical research" (p. 276), one that they further developed in their (2017) study. Another modified framework was provided by Brighton and Foy (2007). The values listed in these models, along with most of the others, have demonstrated, despite some variation in labeling, a lot of overlapping with those in Galtung and Ruge (1965).  This overlapping has also been pointed out by Bednarek and Caple (2017). Few additional values, nevertheless, have been identified, e.g., Entertainment and Good News in Harcup and O'Neill (2001), Topicality in Brighton and Foy (2007), Audio-visuals, and Drama in Harcup and O'Neill (2017).

News values in linguistics

            For their part, linguists who have studied news discourse have also been concerned with news values in varying degrees, though, generally speaking, it is in the last few years that linguistic studies of news values have started to gain considerable attention. Similar to communication scholars, linguists concerned with news values, have taken Galtung and Ruge (1965) as their point of departure. Bell (1991) considered it the "foundation study of news values" (p. 155). Drawing on his previous experience as a journalist, Bell provided his own model of news values, which he classified into three categories related each to one of the three main aspects of news, that is, news actors and events, the news process, and the quality or style of the news text. Of these categories, the first is the one relevant to the discourse analysis of news values. It includes the following news values:  Negativity, Recency, Proximity, Consonance, Unambiguity, Unexpectedness, Superlativeness, Relevance, Personalisation, Eliteness, Attribution and Facticity.

            This inventory includes almost the same factors listed by Galtung and Ruge (1965), with the addition of Attribution and Facticity.  Attribution consists in the eliteness of news sources (the other "Eliteness" value is kept to elite news actors). Facticity refers to the "degree to which a story contains the kinds of facts and figures on which hard news thrives: locations, names, sums of money, numbers of all kinds" (Bell, 1991, p. 158). These values for Bell, "drive the way news stories are gathered, structured, and presented" (Bell, 1991, p. 247, emphasis added) and they can be upgraded by journalists while producing the final story.

            Linguists studying broadcast news have also been concerned with news values, notably, Montgomery (2007), who has viewed news values as principles and criteria that have to be satisfied by events to be included in news coverage. He outlined his own inventory of news values, building on Galtung and Ruge's (1965) "pioneering work", as he referred to it (Montgomery, 2007, p.5). His inventory comprises the following values: Recency/Timeliness, Intensity/Discontinuity, Scale/Scope, Conflict, Personalisation, Power, Negativity, Unexpectedness¸ Consonance¸ Proximity/Cultural relevance, Meaningfulness/Unambiguity, Composition/Fit. Apart from some slight modifications in terminology and combining of some pairs of values in single entries, Montgomery's list is similar to that of Galtung and Ruge (1965).

            Within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of news discourse, news values have been tackled by van Dijk (1988), Fowler (1991), and Richardson (2007). Van Dijk (1988) has emphasized that "news values reflect economic, social, and ideological, values in the discourse reproduction of society through the media" (pp. 120-121). He provided his own inventory of seven news values: Novelty, Recency, Presupposition, Consonance, Relevance, Deviance, Negativity, and Proximity. With the exception of Presupposition, van Dijk's inventory also appears to echo Galtung and Ruge's (1965) one.   By Presupposition, is  meant the shared background knowledge which may be partly implicit and partly summarized and which is required to comprehend novel and recent information.

            Fowler (1991) has emphasized that the values are "cultural" rather than "natural" (p. 13). Thus, for him, unlike Galtung and Ruge (1965), who have distinguished between "culture-bound" and "culture-free" factors, as indicate above, all twelve factors are culture-bound. Richardson (2007) has pointed out to the change of news values "over time, with certain longstanding features of newspapers discontinued in line with changing preferences of the readership" (Richardson, 2007, p. 93). He referred to the "demise" of the Parliament page from British newspaper as a case in point.