To determine how to articulate a concrete definition of the substance of the journalist's occupation, this paper offers a propositional framework of news value based on Kurt Lewin's gatekeeper model. First, the paper follows the established suggestion that news decisions are best studied from a gatekeeping perspective or that "news is whatever journalists say it is." After a discussion of the importance of news decisions and a review of three major types of theoretical models for defining news, an attempt is made to define news in terms of a series of propositional statements and to take a broad look at influences on news judgments. Based on the three models and previous atheoretical research findings, the paper proposes three main dimensions of news value to influence the news decisions made by journalists. These include professional factors, organizational factors, and personal factors. The paper suggests that the framework of propositions describing news judgments center around two constructs: importance and interest. The paper adds that the propositional framework offered, while short of a theory, does suggest an incorporation of other perspectives and disciplines into the study of news decisions. By relating news decisions to the dimensions of interest and importance, the question becomes how the journalists define those terms and what influences those definitions. (One hundred and nineteen references are appended.) (MS)