Interpreting the News

Putting a Face on It: Individual Exposure and Subjectivity in Journalism , 2017

If you could ask a journalist anything – what would it be? The Norwegian online paper VG.no was not sure what to expect when it launched its general " Question and Answers " forum in 2014 as an integrated part of a complex live studio. In this chapter, I examine which topics the readers raise and how the journalists respond to them in samples from 2014 and 2016. I also discuss which roles the journalists take on when acting as studio hosts, and to what extent these micro-dialogues contribute to a more open or even subjective kind of journalism. The analysis shows that the hosts throughout both periods alternate between four main roles: the neutral news oracle; the online pathfinder; the comforting psychologist and the like-minded buddy. The hosts mirror the styles and relationships suggested by the readers, unless the readers ask for their professional or private opinions. In that case, the hosts step back into a traditional news discourse. The relationship between each individual reader and the answering journalist therefore remains pseudo-intimate, as the host might get personal, but not subjective. However, the textual environment turns more hostile during 2015, and in the 2016 material the readers take a more critical stance towards VG.no's journalism in general, and immigrants in particular. Consequently, the hosts increasingly act as verbal sparring partners , which constitutes a fifth and somewhat more confrontational journalistic role.

Journalistica, 2022

Symbolic Interaction, 2022

In this article, we argue for making the frequently invoked notion of "crises of journalism" itself the proper subject of sociological analysis. Based on a case study of a public controversy over an adversarial TV interview with a well-known politician on Austria's public service broadcaster ORF, we provide an analysis of the practical use of crisis claims in metajournalistic discourse. Drawing on ethnomethodology, interactionism, and situational analysis and suggesting the discursive trajectory as an analytic tool, we show that crisis accounts serve as an instrument of politicizing journalistic expertise, i.e., as a discursive strategy of mobilizing heterogeneous actors to impose interpretations of how journalism ought to be.

With professional journalism facing vigorous competition over its jurisdiction in information production from online aggregators and networked forms of journalism, this article examines how journalists publicly construct their own reporting work in opposition to a networked alternative and argue to the public for its value. It does so through a qualitative analysis of discourse from mainstream journalistic sources regarding the document-leaking group WikiLeaks, identifying distinctions journalists made to differentiate their work and its professional value from that of WikiLeaks. The analysis suggests that journalists assign less importance to the sociocultural conventions and objects of evidence that have traditionally constituted professional newswork – documents, interviews, and eyewitness observation – and more significance instead to the less materially bound practices of providing context, judgment, and narrative power. In doing so, journalists cast themselves fundamentally as sense-makers rather than information-gatherers during an era in which information gathering has been widely networked.

Journalism, 2022

This article explores how political parties and individual politicians in Sweden communicate strategically in an online environment where the close relationship between news and journalistic institutions no longer can be taken for granted. We define the adoption and adaption of journalistic conventions in political communication as a particular communication style, conceptualized as "parasitic news". The article presents an analytical framework that explicates the role of parasitic news across five dimensions: ideological transparency/position, alternativeness, news genres, individual vs. collective media practices, and social media affordances. An analysis of three news projects, representing right-wing populist, liberal/conservative, and left-wing/green ideological positions, reveals that parasitic news is a flexible communication style that blurs the boundaries of politics and media in online spaces. Moreover, parasitic news challenges the relevance of established terms such as alternative, hyper-partisan, and fake news, pointing to the need of a renewed conceptual vocabulary in journalism, media and political communication research.

The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2015

A considerable amount of research is devoted to the presence and effects of conflict frames in the news. However, it is unknown if journalists actively manufacture and inflate conflict in their coverage of politics, or if they merely respond to contentious politics as it happens. This study focuses on the extent to which journalists take an interventionist stance in the conflict frame building process. We conducted expert interviews (N = 16) among Dutch political journalists. Results show that journalists indeed take an active stance in conflict frame building. They contribute to the emergence of conflict frames by using exaggerating language, by orchestrating, and by amplifying possible consequences of political conflict. However, intervention in conflict framing is not merely a result of individual agency of journalists. Rather, some role conceptions seem to counter an interventionist stance. Media routines that are embedded in organizational practices were found to facilitate this active role in conflict framing. Finally, journalists are mainly found to be active when politicians or parties with political power are involved.

This paper considers notions of agency, interaction and power in business news journalism. In the first part, we present a bird’s eye view of news access theory as it is reflected in selected sociological and anthropological literature on the ethnography of news production. Next, we show how these theoretical notions can be applied to the study of press releases and particularly to the linguistic pragmatic analysis of the specific social and textual practices that surround their transformation into news reports. Drawing on selected fieldwork data collected at the business desk of a major Flemish quality newspaper, we present an innovative methodology combining newsroom ethnography and computer-assisted writing process analysis which documents how a reporter discovers a story, introduces it into the newsroom, writes and reflects on it. In doing so, we put the individual journalist’s writing practices center stage, zoom in on the specific ways in which he interacts with sources and conceptualize power in terms of his dependence on press releases. Following Beeman & Peterson (2001), we argue in favor of a view of journalism as ‘interpretive practice’ and of news production as a process of entextualization involving multiple actors who struggle over authority, ownership and control. http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/pragmatics/issue/view/129

2020

Focusing on the salient case of news interviewing, this paper investigates the role of journalism in the normalization of radical right-wing politics and the discourses of nationalism and nativism. Normalization is related to transformations in the socio-political landscape, the discursive strategies of political actors, the professional norms of journalism, and the discursive positioning of political views in news reporting. Data include news interviews with the leaders of the Swedish right-wing populist party, the Swedish Democrats. A discourse-and conversation analytical approach is applied to analyze the discursive representations and positioning of political views in four different contexts of interviewing: routine news events, political scandals, live two-party interviews, and set piece interviews. The study shows an overall tendency to normalize and legitimize the political views and language of the radical right. Distinctive practices and mechanisms are identified. The study highlights the challenges of journalism, related to the normalizing implications of the restricted forms of impartiality applied in news journalism.

Brazilian Journalism Research, 2010

The contemporary hybrid media system has certainly enriched as well as entangled the forms of political participation. Among the wide array of participatory practices, this essay considers specifically those aimed at creating, gathering, spreading and verifying information. It discusses new participatory practices in the process of newsmaking. In the more inclusive contemporary cycles of political information, multiple new media actors, emerging elites and non-elites, can produce news and news outlets which can become " spreadable " in the older and newer media, creating hype around an issue and often influencing journalists' agendas. Moreover, newer media actors can participate in the circulation of news by endorsing and contesting news items produced by professional and amateur, top-down and bottom-up, mainstream and alternative news media. This article discusses, summarizes and lists those participatory practices; it then analyses them closely in terms of journalism epistemology. Although issues related to epistemology are overwhelmingly important in journalism, particularly in the contemporary hybrid media system, they have been largely neglected in journalism studies. Epistemology in journalism is to be understood as the criterion of validity that enables journalists to distinguish the false from the true, the probable from the actual. The legitimacy of journalism is intimately bound up with claims of knowledge and truth. Hanitzsch (2007) identifies two dimensions of journalism epistemology: the objectivism/ subjectivism and the empiricism/analytical approaches. This essay explores theoretically whether and how new forms of creating, gathering, spreading and verifying information by non-elite media actors and newer media elites can modify journalists' epistemology. The journalists' attitude to reality is producing contradictory results: it includes new elites in the newsmaking process as well as favoring the diffusion of misinformation.

Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 2011

In speech and language communities with developed spheres of journalism, news talk functions as one of the most authoritative-and potentially influential-forms of linguistic action. How do journalists produce this authoritative discourse? Under what assumptions, ideologies, and constraints are they working on a daily basis? Research into the language of news journalism has blossomed over the past several years, but textual and formal linguistic approaches have tended to sideline the ethnographic attention that would answer these key questions. In this valuable and much-anticipated contribution to the burgeoning field of media anthropology, Colleen Cotter brings a practice-oriented ethnographic approach to investigating the language of traditional newspaper journalism in the contemporary United States and United Kingdom. As a linguist writing from the perspective of a native practitioner of the journalistic craft, Cotter regularly bridges journalistic practice and sociolinguistic analysis, drawing on her experience as a news reporter and editor to offer unusual first-person insight into the newsmaking process. In this monograph, she marries methodological approaches from interactional sociolinguistics with a linguistic anthropological emphasis on ethnographic context to examine production at newspapers of varying scope, from The Washington Post to The Irish Emigrant Newsletter. The result is an innovative contribution to sociolinguistics, media studies, studies of professionalism and professional socialization, and the growing anthropology of media. Within anthropology, it should benefit both specialists in media ethnography and ethnographers who might use journalists' work as primary data. Cotter provides not only a detailed production study for dedicated students of media language, but also a guide to news processes for anthropologists and linguists interested in, for example, how a lead is fashioned or what criteria place a story on page 3 rather than page 1. The reader is introduced to dominant practice traditions within the speech community of professional print journalists, including the "news values," "language attitudes," and emphases on "craft" and "community" that guide daily linguistic decision making. In the introduction and chapter 1, Cotter explains her intervention as one of attending to "the process and practice of everyday journalism" (p. 13), "including the norms and routines of the community of news practitioners," rather than exclusively to text (p. 21). Chapter 1 provides a useful overview of existing studies of media discourse, which, as Cotter points out, have tended to focus on its structure, its linguistic function, and/or the ideologies reflected within and spread by it, especially as developed in studies of linguistic variation, framing, and style and within critical discourse analysis (CDA). While sensitive to (and, indeed, drawing on) the insights generated by research within these frameworks, Cotter positions her work more squarely within the ethnography of communication in the Hymesian tradition. By the "news talk" and "language of journalism" referenced in her title, she thus means to include not only the texts of news stories, but also the "talk that occurs in the course of accomplishing communicative and discursive tasks, between and among members of a community," such as conversations between journalists and meta-discourse about newswriting (p. 23). The remainder of Part I details how journalists are socialized into the "primary values" of craft and community (chapter 2), reporting and editing standards, and news culture more broadly (chapter 3). Much of this is learned in university journalism programs, but Cotter also stresses that "[t]he 'apprentice model' is the operative learning format in the journalist's world," such that the newsroom is as much a locus of learning as the classroom (p. 63). These chapters could be read independently as an introduction to journalists' professionalization. bs_bs_banner E106 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

This study shows how a media professional identity is constructed in (the production of) Flemish political television discourse and identifies how this construction is related to the dynamic operation of power. More concretely, it is the study’s prime spur to identify the constitutive cornerstones of the performance of a media professional identity in political television talk. Therefore, it turns attention to the discursive mechanisms – i.e. the practices and processes – that underlie, support and facilitate the journalist-presenters’ performance of a professional identity in political television talk. At a theoretical level, the study builds upon an integrated discursive and performative approach to account for the dynamism and reflexivity with which identity and power tend to occur in institutional contexts. At a methodological level, the study proposes a combination of conversation analysis and ethnography to concretise the dialectic and situated nature of identity and power. At an empirical level, the study turns to iterative analyses of on-air and off-air practices of media professionals and politicians in the frontstage and backstage settings of political television broadcasting to get a grip on the complexity of identity construction in political television broadcasting. It therefore builds upon a twofold corpus of (1) transcripts of 29 political television broadcasts of De Zevende Dag (The Seventh Day, Eén) and the series of VRT pre-election programmes in 2009 (Vlaanderen 09 (Flanders 09, one-off broadcast, Eén), Europa 09 (Europe 09, one-off broadcast, Eén), Het Groot Debat 09 (The Great Debate 09, one-off broadcast, Eén), TerZake 09 (To the Point 09, a series of 15 broadcasts, Canvas), and Kopstukkendebat (Leading Figures Debate, one-off broadcast, Eén), and (2) fieldnotes from 6 weeks (3 x 2 weeks) of ethnographic observations in the backstage settings of the political television programme Terzake (Canvas). This study brings to light that the journalist-presenters’ construction of a media professional identity in (the production of) political television discourse is contingent upon the articulation of four central aspects: (1) interactional resources; (2) formats; (3) production standards; and (4) team collaborations. The repetitive and performative articulation of interactional resources and format components in the on-air context of political television talk, and of production standards and team collaborations in the off-air context of political television production, show to be the crucial constitutive cornerstones of a media professional identity in this context, both in enabling and disabling ways. Overall, the study arrives at a holistic, kaleidoscopic look that embraces the complexity, dynamism and contingency with which media professional identity tends to be performed in political television discourse.

New Media, Old News: Journalism & Democracy in the Digital Age, 2000

This chapter looks at the ways new media is influencing mediated engagement between politicians, journalists and their publics. Its starting point is a critique of the dominant research approaches that guide much enquiry here: the 'technologicaldeterminist' and 'democratic-normative' lines. These merge democratic communication ideals with ICT potential to produce a blueprint for 'more democratic' forms of mediated public communication. New media enhances communicative exchange and thus brings stronger forms of 'social capital' (Putnam's, 2000 definition). To date, in politics and journalism, such expectations have remained relatively unfulfilled. To investigate why, the research presented here takes more of a 'social shaping' or 'mediated' approach to new ICT adoption. Such work is actorcentred and records how individuals adopt, and change their everyday behaviours, in response to new technologies. Thus, it attempts to observe the daily communicationrelated practices of politicians and journalists and then asks how new ICTs are influencing these and, if so, in what directions.