The Discourse of News Values How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness

The Discourse of News Values breaks new ground in news media research in offering the first book-length treatment of the discursive construction of news values through words and images. Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed empirical analysis to introduce their innovative analytical framework: discursive news values analysis (DNVA). DNVA allows researchers to systematically investigate how reported events are "sold" to audiences as "news" (made newsworthy) through the semiotic resources of language and image.

With an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach, The Discourse of News Values analyzes authentic news discourse (both language and images) from around the English-speaking world through three new case studies: one that analyzes newsworthiness around the topic of cycling/cyclists; another that analyzes news values in images disseminated by news media organizations via Facebook; and a third that focuses on news values in "most shared" news items.

Introducing readers to the possibilities of both DNVA and corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (CAMDA), The Discourse of News Values brings together corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis in a stimulating and unique book for researchers in Linguistics, Semiotics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Media/Journalism Studies.

Monika Bednarek is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. In recent years, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford (2013) and a FRIAS Senior Fellow/Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany (2015-2016). She has published widely in media linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Helen Caple is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism and an ARC DECRA Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research interests centre on news photography, text-image relations and the construction of news values in images. She is currently exploring the role of citizen photography in contemporary journalism, and has published widely in the area of photojournalism and social semiotics.

Table of contents

List of tables
List of figures
Acknowledgements

PART I Introduction
Chapter 1: Introduction
1. The discourse of news values
2. Why study news values?
3. Key terms
4. Corpus assisted multimodal discourse analysis (CAMDA)
5. Summary and overview of chapters

PART II Theory
Chapter 2: News values
1. Journalism/Communications Studies
2. Linguistics
3. A new approach to news values

Chapter 3: Discursive news values analysis (DNVA)
1. The discursive construction of news values
2. Our list and labels
3. Conceptualising news values
4. Context-dependency, preferred meaning and the target audience
5. Example analysis and concluding remarks

PART III Analytical Frameworks
Chapter 4: Language and news values
1. Introduction
2. Towards an inventory of linguistic resources
3. Combining news values and example analysis
4. Summary

Chapter 5: Visuals and news values
1. Introduction
2. The relationship between images and news values
3. Visual resources in images
4. Other semiotic resources constructing news value
5. Front page news: An example analysis
6. Concluding remarks

PART IV Empirical Analysis
Chapter 6: What is newsworthy about cyclists?
1. Introduction
2. The corpus
3. Analysis of 'typical' news values
4. Analysis of news values around cyclists
5. Summary and conclusion

Chapter 7: Image, news values and Facebook
1. Introduction
2. Social media and news feeds
3. Data and methodology
4. Results
5. Conclusion

Chapter 8: 'All the news that's fit to share': News values in 'most shared' news
1. Introduction
2. Data and methodology
3. Verbal patterns
4. Visual patterns
5. Visual-verbal patterns
6. Conclusion

PART V Extensions
Chapter 9: DNVA as an opportunity for diachronic and cross-cultural research
1. Salacious Fiends and News from the Dead: Diachronic research
2. El terror yihadista, Terroralarm, terrordramat: Cross-cultural research
3. Concluding remarks

Chapter 10: Reflections
1. From little things, big things grow (Chapter 1)
2. Surveying the field: It's a jungle out there (Chapter 2)
3. Situating our own approach to news values: Which corner of the jungle do we inhabit? (Chapter 3)
4. The discourse of news values (Chapters 4 and 5)
5. Case Study 1: 'Pedaling' a critical, topic-based approach to DNVA (Chapter 6)
6. Case Study 2: DNVA and the digital disrupters of social media (Chapter 7)
7. Case Study 3: Combining DNVA and CAMDA (Chapter 8)
8. X?nwén jiàzhí, arzeshe khabari, Khabari Iqdaar (Chapter 9)
9. Concluding remarks

Appendices
References
Index