Don’t you just love reading The New York Times with your morning coffee? I usually scan the paper’s website before I start my day. This week, I am looking at how editors determine newsworthiness and how this impacts PR professionals.

Let’s start with the Times. One of the things I love about the website is that stories on the homepage constantly change. I also like that they choose science stories, art stories or strong personal profiles as their lead at times. It’s likely that political stories far outnumber the others, but they are not always made into the dominant story on the page.

The Los Angeles Times appears to give “celebrity stories” some coverage on its homepage – likely because of its location. Today (Oct 28), they had a story about royal succession on the homepage.

Looking at other websites such as MSNBC and CNN, the economy, Afghanistan, Libya and human interest features were common topics of news coverage.

Because I consume my news online, it was actually challenging to figure out newsworthiness. I tend to scan the top papers, and enter search terms on Google News. I rely on news aggregators to tell me the top news of the day. Also, as there is no physical limit to a newspaper’s web content, the scrolling goes on and on and on. There is so much information out there, that every person’s news need is more or less fulfilled.

The traditional news values still determine what makes news: proximity, currency, conflict, prominence and well, the “bizarre”. But in today’s digital age, especially for people in my demographic, the control lies in the hands of the people. We determine what makes news. We “like” things on Facebook, we Tweet links to stories we like.

I would never have read this article unless I saw the link everywhere. I read it, liked it, and told a friend about it. You should read it too, it’s good!

What does this trend mean for PR professionals? I think a savvy professional will realize that he or she can go straight to the people by utilizing social media. This is especially useful for PR people who work in the music or film industry, because people want celebrity news (what that says about us as a society is another matter altogether). While this gives a high degree of control over content, I think the best sort of positive publicity comes when a respected newspaper praises the work done by your company. Practitioners have to be adept at spotting trends and looking at the bigger picture if they are to have a reporter’s interest. What do you think?