An analysis of news headlines under the light of Relevance Theory, newsworthiness and sensationalism (original) (raw)

Newsworthiness, attribution and lexicogrammatical strategies in two types of news articles in English and Spanish

The contrastive analysis of two sets of newspaper articles has been carried out in order to observe how the reports of the same events are constructed in two different languages and cultures as represented by El País and The Guardian newspapers. The first set of texts consists of two science popularization articles dealing with the same scientific finding (Bee Texts), whereas the second set consists of all the articles covering the opening day of a world summit held in Rome (Summit Texts) which were published in the online versions of El País and The Guardian respectively. Newsworthiness (Bell, 1991), attribution and lexicogrammatical strategies have been studied in order to show how ideological construction has been developed in these two different kinds of report, one dealing with a non-controversial event (as represented in the Bee Texts) and the other with a controversial event (as represented in the Summit Texts).

(2013) Towards a pragmalinguistic framework for the study of sensationalism in news headlines

This article sets out a framework for a language-oriented analysis of sensationalism in news media. Sensationalism is understood here as a discourse strategy of 'packaging' information in news headlines in such a way that news items are presented as more interesting, extraordinary and relevant than might be the case. Unlike previous content analyses of sensational coverage, this study demonstrates how sensationalism is instantiated through specific illocutions, semantic macrostructures, narrative formulas, evaluation parameters, and interpersonal and textual devices. Examples are drawn from a corpus of headlines of the 'most read' articles in the online outlet of the British mid-market tabloid Daily Mail compiled in early 2012. Sensationalized instances are identified through surveys and focus group discussions and subsequently analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The study is located within the context of media scholarship on news values and current trends in journalism.

Towards a pragma-linguistic framework for the study of sensationalism in news headlines

Discourse & Communication, 2013

A new approach for measuring subjectivity in Brazilian news

Journal of Information and Data Management

With the advent of digital journalism, information democratization has become a reality since news articles are published as soon as the facts occur, and that they are accessible from any device connected to the internet. It is common sense the perception that some media outlets are more biased than others when it comes to the way of exposing the facts. However, automatic ways of measuring such biases is still an open research challenge. Under the assumption that journalistic texts must have an objective and impartial language, high levels of subjectivity in these texts may indicate bias. This paper proposes an initial analysis on the usage of subjectivity lexicons to characterize subjectivity in seven popular media outlets in Brazil. To better understand the obtained results, we carried out a correlation analysis between the levels of subjectivity, readability, and news popularity metrics. The adopted methods, along with the findings obtained from this research, may contribute to a...

On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers

Journal of Pragmatics, 2003

This paper suggests an explanatory functional characterization of newspaper headlines. Couched within Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory, the paper makes the claim that headlines are designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers: Headlines provide the readers with the optimal ratio between contextual effect and processing effort, and direct readers to construct the optimal context for interpretation. The paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted in the news-desk of one daily newspaper. It shows that the set of intuitive professional imperatives, shared by news-editors and copy-editors, which dictates the choice of headlines for specific stories, can naturally be reduced to the notion of relevance optimization. The analysis explains why the construction of a successful headline requires an understanding of the readers-their state-of-knowledge, their beliefs and expectations and their cognitive styles-no less than it requires an understanding of the story. It also explains the fact that skilled newspaper readers spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines-rather than reading the stories. #

The Distinction Between News and Reportage in the Brazilian Journalistic Context: A Matter of Degree

2009

introduction In my previous researches on news and reportage (Bonini, 2003a, 2003b, 2006; Kindermann & Bonini, 2006) I have found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between exemplars of these two genres and in finding consistent and clear definitions for them in the literature, even though they are treated as distinct genres within Brazilian journalistic culture. Instead I have found that there is a continuum of genres with purer forms of news to reportage at the poles, with mixed forms in between. This work is based on the new rhetoric approach to genre studies, more specifically on the view of genre as a social action as proposed by Miller (1984), and later developed by Swales (1990) and Bazerman (1994, 2004). The exemplars of news and reportage considered here were published in the Brazilian newspaper Jornal do Brasil, and therefore belong to a specific journalistic culture. Yet, even though focusing on a specific cultural environment, the research findings about the genres...

LINGUISTIC MEANS FOR REALIZATION AND EVALUATION OF THE MESSAGE IN NEWSPAPER HEADLINES

Vilniaus universiteto Kauno humanitarinis fakultetas Muitinės g. 8, Kaunas, Lietuva El. p. zivil@takas.lt Ab stract T he article investigates functions of the language and anal ys es ho w evaluation is maintained in ne ws paper headlines. Language gathers it s o wn emotional and cultural el ements that depend on sub-cult ures in which the languag e exists. Written text has a graphological level, and all texts have a lexical level and structur al level. Evaluation concerns evaluative vocabulary. "Good-bad" denotes the qualitative evaluation of facts, "true-fals e" reflects this parameter and evalu ates facts, events, and people from the point of vie w of conformity with the commonl y accepted norm.

Pragmatics of Political News Reports Worthiness

International Journal of English Linguistics

With the numerousness of political events and the competition among news media channels, news manufacturing becomes highly weighty to attract audience's attention aiming at changing their minds. As such, news reporters tend to pick out certain events that can be viewed as newsworthy. However, news manufacturing turns to be the reporters’ main interest and the various ways used to fulfill this purpose fall into their primary tasks. Among these ways, pragmatic mechanisms of language stand as the most appropriate means to create such newsworthiness. Thus, this study has set itself the task to be after these pragmatic mechanisms as employed by CNN reporters in their attempts to initiate, construct and maximize newsworthiness of the events in question. The findings attained at by this study fully verify some of its hypotheses and partially vindicate other ones.

An analysis of news headlines under the light of Relevance Theory, newsworthiness and sensationalism (original) (raw)

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