Which news values apply in the story? Give a range of examples and make specific reference to theory including Galtung and Ruge and narrative (Levi-Strauss). Consider the role of ideology.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/school-at-base-of-grenfell-tower-reopened-48-hours-after-fire-because-education-too-important-to-a3668561.html

In the news story ‘School at base of Grenfell Tower reopened 48 hours after fire as 'education too important to halt', head teacher says’ the news values negativity, threshold, proximity, and personalisation. News values are the values that news professionals use to decide whether a news story is worthy or not. Galtung and Ruge came up with the idea of news values as they argued that news was structured according to unspoken values rather than simply being discovered. 

The first news value in this article is negativity. The news value of negativity is when bad (negative) stories are favoured over positive stories. This is negative because the Grenfell tower fire was a tragedy due to the amount of deaths and the amount of people affected. The evening standard could have chosen any story, including more positive ones, but they choose one about the Grenfell tower tragedy due to them knowing it would attract more readers than a happier story.

The next news value is threshold. Threshold is the size of an event for it to be considered newsworthy which are usually commonly occurring tragic events. The Grenfell tower fire is a story that continues to be covered due to how shocking it was as well as all of the different facts that keep being discovered. This story in particular was probably covered due to it being hard to believe the school would reopen only 2 days after the incident when many of the students lived in the tower. The shocking nature of this story therefore makes it newsworthy.

Proximity is the next news value presented in this story. Proximity means how close to home a news story is. For example, a news story closer to home is more likely to be covered than a news story further away although it is usually ideologically closer rather than physically (e.g. a story in Australia will more likely be covered than one in Africa due to the ideological proximity despite being further away). The Grenfell tower fire was physically close to home so therefore got a lot of news coverage. Also, the school that reopened was physically close to the tower which only added to the surprise of it reopening. 

The last news value presented in this article is personalisation which is when a news story is personalized for human interest. This article is personalised as they could have used any story from the Grenfell tower incident but decided to use one about a school reopening just 48 hours after the fire. This causes a reader to feel shocked and surprised about the headline so they'll want to read the article in order to find out more about the story. However, if they had used a different story or headline people may have been uninterested and not wanted to read about it. 

To conclude the news values in this article are negativity, threshold, proximity, and personalisation. This story is shocking, close to home and has many things to cover to therefore fits all of these news values.