Abstract
News values are central to journalism practices in that the basic tenets of news discourse have to do with creating newsworthiness of reported events. Since the seminal work on news values by Galtung and Ruge (1965), the research literature has recorded a proliferation of conceptualizations of news values, highlighting and often conflating, different aspects of news values (e.g., social, material, cognitive, and discursive).
These aspects, albeit intimately interconnected, should be clearly demarcated to allow for a close scrutiny of the conceptual rigor, epistemological status, and methodological operationalization of news values. Despite the vast literature on news values, their semiotic aspect has been largely ignored. Bednarek, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, and Caple, senior lecturer in journalism at the University of New South Wales, set out to offer new insights into the semiotic mechanism of news values in published news stories.
The book begins with a critical review of the ways news values have been conceptualized in linguistics and journalism/communication studies, and outlines the analytical framework of the discursive approach to news values. Part II introduces an inventory of linguistic and visual resources that construct news values. In Part III, Chapters 6 to 8 illustrate through three empirical studies how the discursive approach can be applied to examine both a particular topic (cyclists/cycling) and general topics in social media (Facebook). Part IV exemplifies how the discursive approach can be applied to and benefit from diachronic and cross-cultural studies.
One of the key contributions of the book is its introduction of a new analytical framework that allows a focused view on semiotic construction organized around eleven news values: Consonance, Eliteness, Impact, Negativity/Positivity, Personalization, Proximity, Superlativeness, Timeliness, Unexpectedness, and Aesthetic Appeal.
Bednarek and Caple consistently argue and succinctly illustrate that these news values are not simply inherent in news discourse, but rather are constructed through semiotic resources. Their focus on how an event is constructed as news rather than how it is selected as news generates a unique discursive perspective on news discourse as journalistic semiotic practices, and allows for the possibility of applying a new method—corpus-assisted multimodal analysis—by integrating multimodal analysis, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. This approach also affords investigating patterns of news values across and within semiotic modes (e.g., language, image).
These affordances notwithstanding, we should be aware that the discursive approach to news values prioritizes the question of how an event is discursively constructed as news instead of why. To explore the latter issue, ethnographically informed study of its other aspects (social, cognitive, and material) is also necessary. In addition, the importance of a corpus-assisted approach should not be overemphasized. The reason for this is fourfold. First, news values are matters of degree. For instance, Timeliness is about “how an event is established as temporally relevant to the reader at the time of publication/broadcast”; but the boundary of recency is debatable. Second, news values are dependent on target audience. For example, a local governor would be easily recognized as elite in his or her community, and thus establish the news value of Eliteness, but not beyond. Third, news values are highly sensitive to context. This is particularly true when the corpus is too large to allow close scrutiny of all instances of searched results. Finally, news values, as semantic resources, can be realized by a wide spectrum of lexico-grammatical resources. Therefore, we cannot search the corpus for a closed list of news value devices. The scalar nature, context-sensitive nature, and target audience–dependency of news values, together with an open-end list of discursive realizations of news values, may often frustrate analysts’ annotation and quantification of discursive realizations of news values.
It should also be noted that this book has updated and refined the prevailing definitions of some news values in the existing research. To be specific, Positivity is newly incorporated into the framework and defined in relation to Negativity. Consonance is redefined not in relation to the expectedness or predictability of events, but rather as the construction of an event’s news actors, social groups, organizations, or countries/nations in a way that conforms to stereotypes that members of the target audience hold about them. Personalization excludes references to criminals, militants, or terrorists. Novelty has been replaced with Unexpectedness, and newness has been incorporated into Timeliness. Thus, scholars should apply with caution the different versions of this approach.
Overall, this book breaks new ground and makes an original contribution to the field by offering (a) a new theoretical approach to the study of discursive construction of news values, (b) a comprehensive analytical framework for linguistic and visual analysis of news values, and (c) a range of corpus techniques and tools that can generate well-grounded findings. The approach and findings also bear pedagogical implications by informing the teaching and learning of journalistic semiotic practices. Hence, this well-organized and clearly written monograph is recommended for both emerging and established researchers who are engaged in discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, and corpus linguistics, as well as for journalism educators.