Economic-financial journalists as argumentative intermediaries (original) (raw)

Journalism and formation of argument

This article is an attempt to offer a model for the analysis of a journalistic argument. The model of analysis applied in this research is the result of a combination of two theoretical models: Van Dijk’s model of editorials and the model of argument developed by Toulmin. Although the article – conceptualized as a comparative media study – tested the offered model of analysis on newspaper editorials, the model is designed as a master template, flexible enough to accommodate requirements for the analysis of a journalistic argument delivered via different media platforms. The proposed model of analysis is applied to editorials on the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s published by two newspapers, the American The New York Times and the Serbian Politika. The results of the analysis will contribute to a better understanding of how journalists conceptualize justice in times of conflicts and the role a journalistic argument plays in the wider public debate on armed conflicts.

Framing the news: an ethnographic view of financial newswriting

This article is an ethnographic case study of a senior business reporter as he discovers, writes, and reflects on a news story. We ‘‘follow the story’’ from its entry in the newsroom through the review process during a story meeting and the writing process up to the point the story is filed for copy editing. Drawing on ethnographic data, this article sheds light on how a news story about Russian gas exports to France is discursively constructed. In this writing process, we focus in particular on a frame shift in the construction of the lead and argue that this shift is led primarily by technological rather than overt ideological concerns. The detailed description of one newswriting process supports the argument that framing is an interpretive practice achieved within the demands, relationships, and discourses that anchor business news as a social institution. http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/TEXT.2010.009

The making of economic news: Dutch economic journalists contextualizing their work

Journalism

Research on economic and financial journalism has left important questions unanswered. Most notably, what exactly are the mechanisms leading up to the well-documented negativity bias in economic news reporting, and to what extent are structural constraints, previously identified in research on financial news production, also relevant in the context of mainstream economic news that reaches out to a broad and lay audience? This study seeks to address these questions by conducting in-depth interviews with 12 economic journalists working for Dutch news outlets (print, online, and television). The findings suggest that negativity is driven more by news values than by journalistic role conceptions, as many interviewees refer to the abrupt temporal dynamics typical of negative events. Furthermore, journalists indicate that gatekeeping processes are increasingly influenced by audience preferences, as indicators such as aging readerships and number of clicks are carefully monitored.

“Maybe there’s a very simple debate”: how journalists frame a public debate in the newsroom

Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage

Taking the perspective of a newsroom ethnographic approach, our paper interrogates the decision-making process that leads to establish a public debate as a news product. More precisely our paper details the argumentation in interaction engaging broadcast journalists during an editorial conference: who argues? When and how is argumentation joint constructed? By the means of what interactional and linguistic ressources? How does argumentation in interaction shape the news product? In our case study we focus on how argumentation develops within the specific genre of “debate”, and how the journalists come to debate about a specific genre of news item : a public debate to be broadcast as a report in the news bulletin.

Telling Media Tales: the news story as rhetoric

The thesis explores the rhetorical properties of the modern news report. In order to account for the distinctive style of news reporting it extends Systemic Functional Linguistic theories of the interpersonal to develop new analyses of the semantics of attitude, evaluation and inter-subjective positioning. It applies these analyses to identify three distinct interpersonal modes of news reporting style which will be termed journalistic 'voices'. These analyses are used to explicate the rhetorical properties of the voice most typically associated with 'hard news' reporting, to be termed 'reporter voice'.

Objectivity in newsmaking: an argumentative perspective

Objectivity is a pivotal – yet controversial – concept in journalism studies. Scholars disagree on what it precisely implies and on how strictly journalists should stick to it. Adopting an argumentative perspective enables reconstructing how journalists concretely deal with the objectivity requirement, which plays the role of endoxical premise in newsroom argumentative decision-making. The selected case studies shed light on what objectivity means and how journalists achieve it in two Swiss public service television newsrooms.

Undurraga 2017 Making news of value exploiting dissonance in economic journalism JCE previuos version.pdf

This article explores the multiple modes of valuation that pervade newsmaking in economic journalism. It does so by exploring the different ways in which journalists at Valor Econômico, the leading economic newspaper in Brazil, compete and cooperate in the production of news. Valor is a paradigmatic case for discussing valuation practices in newsmaking since its institutional promise is to produce news of value. How, if at all, do Valor journalists embrace the promise of producing news that generates value? Elaborating on Stark’s (2009) idea of dissonance, it is contended that different orders of worth collide and cooperate within Valor newsroom. Moreover, journalists engage in a variety of valuation practices through which these orders of worth are shaped, defined and refined, reflecting different understanding of economy and society, and different conceptions of what journalism is good for. I argue that Valor’s direction intentionally fosters a plural space of value dissonance in order to improve the quality of news reporting. I emphasise, however, that these dissonances are only productive against a larger background of consonance about what actually there is to disagree about. The article is based on a 7-month ethnography of Valor’s newsroom in São Paulo between 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Journalist’s arguing newsmaking decisions on the basis of anticipated audience uptake

Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage

Journalists’ expectations concerning the way in which the audience will react to news strongly influence their decisions in newsmaking. This article investigates the argumentative dimension of journalists’ anticipatory inferences in newsroom editorial conferences. In order to study journalists’ reasoning processes concerning audience uptake that lead journalists to publish a certain news instead of another or to publish a news in a certain way, we will use the Pragma-Dialectical framework at the interactional level and Argumentum Model of Topics at the inferential level. Through a case study, we will investigate the anticipation of the audience interest and the anticipation of the audience persuasion, showing how editorial conferences function as places of reflection in which certain kinds of standpoints are at stake and particular aspects of the audience uptake are anticipated.