Headlines play a crucial role in attracting audiences’ attention to online artefacts (e.g. news articles, videos, blogs). The ability to carry out an automatic, large-scale analysis of headlines is critical to facilitate the selection and prioritisation of a large volume of digital content. In journalism studies news content has been extensively studied using manually annotated news values - factors used implicitly and explicitly when making decisions on the selection and prioritisation of news items. This paper presents the first attempt at a fully automatic extraction of news values from headline text. The news values extraction methods are applied on a large headlines corpus collected from The Guardian, and evaluated by comparing it with a manually annotated gold standard. A crowdsourcing survey indicates that news values affect people’s decisions to click on a headline, supporting the need for an automatic news values detection.