This book presents a new, interdisciplinary theory of news in the press. It argues that news should be studied primarily as a form of public discourse. While much mass communication research focuses on the economic, social, or cultural dimensions of news and media, this study emphasizes the importance of an explicit structural analysis of news reports. Such an analysis should provide a qualitative alternative to traditional content analysis. The book also pays attention to the processes of news production by journalists and news comprehension by readers in terms of the social cognitions of news participants. This allows news structures to be explicitly linked to social practices and ideologies of newsmaking and, indirectly, to the institutional and macrosociological contexts of the news media.
After a survey of recent studies of news in different disciplines, both in the United States and Europe, Chapter 2 discusses the respective levels and dimensions of the structures of news reports in the press. Besides the usual linguistic and grammatical analysis of news language, an account is given of the important notions of topic and news schema, which represent the overall content and conventional form of news reports. Finally, stylistic and rhetorical structures of news are analyzed. It is shown that these various structures of the news are systematically related to the cognitive and social conditions of news production, as well as to the processes of understanding by the readers.
Chapters 3 and 4 feature the more empirical, cognitive, and social psychological approach to news production and reception. They report results of field studies on everyday news production as source text processing by journalists and on recall of news stories by readers. Their theoretical basis derives from current advances in text processing within cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, the processes of production and understanding news have an important social dimension, so that they should be accounted for in terms of social cognitions of newsmakers and readers. This also allows the integration of our account into a sociological analysis of news and news media.
This book should be of interest for students and researchers in the fields of mass communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, and cognitive and social psychology. To facilitate comprehension for readers from different disciplines, these chapters also feature an introduction to the respective theoretical notions used in the analysis of news structures and processes.
The field studies reported in this book were carried out with the assistance of the following students of the University of Amsterdam: Sjoukje de Bie, Juliette de Bruin, Hellen Claver, Jane Alice Coerts, Gemma Derksen, Barbara Diddens, Jeroen Fabius, Guus Gillard d'Arcy, Michel Gijselhart, Karin Greep, José Hermans, Dienke Hondius, Kitty Jansman, Nico de Klerk, Liesbeth Klumper, Rie Kromhout, Stan Liebrand, Anja Lok, Marianne Louwes, Ingeborg van Oosterom, Hans Pols, Anke Riem, Patrice RiemensThis book presents a new, interdisciplinary theory of news in the press. It argues that news should be studied primarily as a form of public discourse. While much mass communication research focuses on the economic, social, or cultural dimensions of news and media, this study emphasizes the importance of an explicit structural analysis of news reports. Such an analysis should provide a qualitative alternative to traditional content analysis. The book also pays attention to the processes of news production by journalists and news comprehension by readers in terms of the social cognitions of news participants. This allows news structures to be explicitly linked to social practices and ideologies of newsmaking and, indirectly, to the institutional and macrosociological contexts of the news media.
After a survey of recent studies of news in different disciplines, both in the United States and Europe, Chapter 2 discusses the respective levels and dimensions of the structures of news reports in the press. Besides the usual linguistic and grammatical analysis of news language, an account is given of the important notions of topic and news schema, which represent the overall content and conventional form of news reports. Finally, stylistic and rhetorical structures of news are analyzed. It is shown that these various structures of the news are systematically related to the cognitive and social conditions of news production, as well as to the processes of understanding by the readers.
Chapters 3 and 4 feature the more empirical, cognitive, and social psychological approach to news production and reception. They report results of field studies on everyday news production as source text processing by journalists and on recall of news stories by readers. Their theoretical basis derives from current advances in text processing within cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, the processes of production and understanding news have an important social dimension, so that they should be accounted for in terms of social cognitions of newsmakers and readers. This also allows the integration of our account into a sociological analysis of news and news media.
This book should be of interest for students and researchers in the fields of mass communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, and cognitive and social psychology. To facilitate comprehension for readers from different disciplines, these chapters also feature an introduction to the respective theoretical notions used in the analysis of news structures and processes.
The field studies reported in this book were carried out with the assistance of the following students of the University of Amsterdam: Sjoukje de Bie, Juliette de Bruin, Hellen Claver, Jane Alice Coerts, Gemma Derksen, Barbara Diddens, Jeroen Fabius, Guus Gillard d'Arcy, Michel Gijselhart, Karin Greep, José Hermans, Dienke Hondius, Kitty Jansman, Nico de Klerk, Liesbeth Klumper, Rie Kromhout, Stan Liebrand, Anja Lok, Marianne Louwes, Ingeborg van Oosterom, Hans Pols, Anke Riem, Patrice Riemens