A social networking system displays stories describing actions to a user in a news ticker. The stories may be selected so that a variety of types of stories, stories associated with a variety of users, or stories associated with a variety of actions are presented via the news ticker. Additionally, stories having a common characteristic, such as being associated with a common user, may be aggregated and a description of the aggregated stories is presented in the news ticker. For example, stories aggregated based on acting user may identify the user common to the stories and a description of the aggregated stories may be displayed. Further, the value to the social networking system of displaying different types of content may be used to modify how different types of content are displayed in the news ticker.