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Although linguists have been studying the “News” as a type of text for a long period of time, the researches have been mainly of the product-oriented types, which purely analyze the news texts and their linguistic characteristics. Linguists and media researchers have been mainly keen to determine sets of criteria known as “News Values” so far, and the result is various lists of media and linguistic news selection norms. The goal of this article is finding answer for the following questions: How news production process can be orchestrated in a linguistic model? What are the linguistic news values? and How these linguistic values correlate with other selection criteria? In addition to revisiting the theoretical notion of “News Values” and introducing the “Grice Maxims” as the linguistic criteria of news composition, this paper, as a descriptive analytical study based on field work, also represents the multi-level model of news composition and selection based on linguistically oriented findings. The mentioned model not only determines and explains different levels of news composition and selection process from the event to the news, but also puts the role of macro-structural elements of news discourse production such as ideology, relations of power and composition in the center of attention.

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How does a journalist or an editor decide which news is worthy and which is not? According to some media researchers, they refer to a set of news values. One of the best known lists of such news values have been supplied by Johan Galtung and Marie H. Ruge. An analytical discussion on news values always refers to this list, which initially intended to cover international events. These factors include: 1- Frequency 2- Threshold 3- Unambiguity 4- Meaningfulness 5- Consonance 6- Unexpectedness 7- Continuity 8- Composition 9- Reference to elite nations 10- Reference to elite people 11-Reference to persons 12- Negativity. The current research collected 303 headlines from the front pages of four widely circulated Iranian newspapers: Hamshahri, Keyhan, Shargh and Iran. Out of these headlines, 426 news were distinguished and considered. As such, results show that the factors like reference to elite people (F10) and consonance (F5) play main role in Iranian press. Further Iranian press do not focus on Galtung and Ruge’s news values although, in general, headlines possess one or more of above factors. However, two factors (F10 and F5) show that Iranian press follow traditional process in news selection.