Focal points on constructing news stories

The issues stated in the article line with the current interest to pragmatic value of news releases in modern media. The news is thought to be a verbalized focal reflection of some event that was chosen by media professionals for setting the current information agenda. Having generated the opinions on the newsworthiness the authors present a set of values that may be used for measurement of relevance and clarity of an event reflection in the news content with frequency, clarity, predictability, unexpectedness, amplitude, cultural proximity, elite nations, elite people, personification, negativity among them. The novelty of the research is that the newsworthiness is checked with the focus to lexical (thematic) representation of the news in a diachronic approach: the empirical base of the research was taken from the archives of UK national and local media sources (18-20 th cent.) and implied comparison of lexical means that reflected an event itself and some values of human interest potential in the news stories written in defined periods. The article states the trend for dynamics in the way the event is reflected in the news stories - the information core of the story is merged with detailed reporting parts, and their content is conditioned by social and moral values.