This paper advocates a ‘discursive’ approach to news values, which matches well with two recent CDA trends towards multimodal and corpus-aided discourse analysis. More specifically, the British case studies demonstrate that corpus linguistic methods can pinpoint conventionalised discursive devices that are frequently employed in news discourse to build and preserve an ideology of newsworthiness. Such methods can also supply a functional hint of the discursive construction of news values with respect to a particular subject, event or news actor.