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The Communication Review
Storying the News Through Category, Action, and Reason. Thornborrow and Fitzgerald (2004) Communication Review.2004 •
Abstract From a sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspective, news stories have often been considered as operating within a similar structural framework to oral narratives (Labov, 1972), sharing formal elements with narratives produced in other contexts (although as Bell (1991) has demonstrated in relation to print news, these elements occur in temporal disorganisation). In this paper, in line with other recent treatments of news stories, we suggest that news does not conform to this kind of ‘narrative’ structure as such. Examining data taken from print and live broadcast TV news through a Sacksian (1995) lens, we argue that it is possible to simplify the analysis of news structure by approaching the news as ‘stories’, where the story elements are organised around the notions of category, action and reason rather than as a series of narrative clauses involving orientation, complicating actions, evaluation and resolution (Bell, 1991; van Dijk, 1988).
Published in Discourse, Context, Media.
Categories, norms and inferences. Generating entertainment in a daytime talk show. (2012). Discourse, Context, Media.2012 •
This paper examines the way the host of a UK day time television talk show, The JeremyKyleShow, generates entertainment through framing guests’ stories using membership categories and category-based moral evaluations. The analysis draws upon Membership Categorisation Analysis, and in particular Sacks’s(1995) discussion of categorial inferencing and category norms,to examine the way the host overlays individuals with membership categories and category-based actions. Moreover, this category work then provides for subsequent normative reasoning and moral judgements to be made for the overhearing audience. In summary the analysis demonstrates the way the show operates through making individuals and their actions morally accountable for the overhearing audience through routine categorisation work and related norms of behaviour.
2016 •
This article analyzes a television news story using a particular example. In line with the research tradition of the ethnomethodological approach of membership categorization analysis, our main analytical concerns are (i) to understand the logic of practical reasoning and intelligibility involved in the production of the news story; (ii) to examine how this intelligibility is generated and what resources-such as commonsense knowledge of the social structures-are used to make the news story communicable; and (iii) to explore how specific forms of categorization employed in the news story are used to induce certain readings or to promote certain worldviews. The news story analyzed describes the progressive increase of foreign participants at the San Fermín running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. It also highlights the still minority participation by women at this massive event. The results of the analysis show that both "foreigners" and "women" are presented as being in the wrong place. Through association with their typical predicates, both "foreigners" and "women" are construed in the news story as the "other." A final reflection is made on the concept of identity, which is understood as a situated accomplishment.
Studies in Communication Sciences
Saying “story” in the newsroom. Towards a linguistic ethnography of narrative lexicon in broadcast news2018 •
Despite a general agreement on the narrative nature of news, the question of what it means for the journalists to tell a story is usually taken for granted, while the analysis of the actual narrative practices in the newsrooms often remains shallow. A way of overcoming this state of affairs is to have a look at the narrative practices and norms in the newsroom. On the one hand, one can track the sites of narrative engagement in the newsroom, where journalists are telling or handling stories in order to achieve their work of making news. On the other hand, one can track the metacommentaries that foreground a narrative orientation to news, when journalists evaluate storying choices or when they use a narrative-related lexicon. This paper explores the latter aspect by tracking the uses of the word “histoire” (story) in the newsroom of a Swiss Public Broadcasting Corporation. The paper identifies and analyses three different meanings of “histoire”: “histoire” as a genre, “histoire” as a set of information and “histoire” as a semiotic product. As a reflexive means, “histoire” enables the media practitioners to navigate the very practical tasks entailed by the production of the multimodal artefact that a television news item is.
Marcel Burger. (ed) L’analyse linguistique des discours des médias. SBN: 978-2-89518-303-7
Generating News: Agenda Setting in Radio Broadcast News (2008). Fitzgerald , Jaworski, Housley in Marcel Burger. (ed) L’analyse linguistique des discours des médias2008 •
"INTRODUCTION The news broadcast is a highly familiar institutional event in which the latest ‘news’ is presented through routine discursive structures that provide a newsworthy framework for events to be reported into (Clayman and Heritage, 2002). However, as has been emphasised by many authors, news is not only concerned with reporting ‘events’. Rather, media organisations are in the business of news production. ‘They construct it, they construct facts, they construct statements and they construct context in which these facts make sense. They construct “a” reality’ (Vasterman, 1995, quoted in Harcup and O’Neill, 2001 : 265 ; see also Tuchman, 1978). Or, as Schudson puts it : ‘To ask “Is this news ?” is not to ask only “Did it just happen ?” It is to ask “Does this mean something ?”’ (Schudson, 1987 : 84). Thus, while ‘breaking’ news, i.e. reporting on unanticipated major events, may still be the top priority among newsmakers, the work of new journalists has been likened to the work on the assembly line with news being searched for, gathered, selected, and eventually turned into stories in a routinized process of news-making (e.g. Gans, 1980 ; Cook, 1998). Reporting and presenting stories gathered by a programme, however, creates a possible site of tension where usual editorial values may be passed over in favour of carrying a story the programme has sourced through its own investigative journalism. We explore this blurring by focusing upon the discursive placement of news and the creation of a news agenda through an examination of two examples taken from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Using the ethnomethodological approach of membership category analysis, we suggest that the presenters are seen to engage in complex categorial work in the process of creating a topical context for an issue to appear in the news programme as well as the subsequent development of the issue as a relevant news agenda during the programme."
Abstract On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik attacked a Christmas gathering in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and wounding 22. On December 4, the news media were granted access to the couple’s home by the landlord. The ensuing news scrum entering the house was broadcast live to air, with reporters in the house identifying objects. In this paper we use Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) and particularly categorial inferencing to examine the way journalists, on being granted access to the house for the first time, and under pressure to produce news live on air, resorted to various forms of speculation and assumptions to generate news within the liminal zone. In particular, we examine how objects found in the home were used to occasion newsworthy discourses through categorial reasoning around why and how these objects were used and what they might indicate about the people and events. It is through these routine social categorial reasoning practices that is possible to examine journalists’ routine work as displaying a ‘news-culture-in-action’ whereby individuals and their actions are rendered as news relevant categories and articulated through categorial inferred reasoning practices. Key words. Live News Broadcasting, Liminal Zone, Membership Categorisation Analysis, Categorial Inferencing, Occasioned Objects, News-Culture-in-Action.
2007 •
2020 •
This paper addresses the task of automatically detecting narrative structures in raw texts. Previous works have utilized the oral narrative theory by Labov and Waletzky to identify various narrative elements in personal stories texts. Instead, we direct our focus to news articles, motivated by their growing social impact as well as their role in creating and shaping public opinion. We introduce CompRes -- the first dataset for narrative structure in news media. We describe the process in which the dataset was constructed: first, we designed a new narrative annotation scheme, better suited for news media, by adapting elements from the narrative theory of Labov and Waletzky (Complication and Resolution) and adding a new narrative element of our own (Success); then, we used that scheme to annotate a set of 29 English news articles (containing 1,099 sentences) collected from news and partisan websites. We use the annotated dataset to train several supervised models to identify the diffe...
The Internet generally, and social media particularly, provide rich and varied environments for interactional encounters and exchanges between increasingly inter-connected networks of users. The consequences of this continuing evolution in and between digital communicative spaces are far-reaching. With the arrival of Web 2.0, and the imminent potential of Web 3.0 and 4.0, internet users have been able to routinely engage with each other through and across multiple sites and platforms which contain massive amounts of multi-modal content, uploading photos, videos and other formats that are shared across the spaces of the net. As these exchanges become more and more commonplace, and deeply embedded as social practice within and across contexts, one of the consequences has been the steady erosion of the boundaries between on line ‘virtual’ and off line ‘real life’ spaces for communicative actions. These spaces are becoming increasingly fluid: indeed, the terms barely seem appropriately delimited now as the ‘virtual’ environment is ever more tightly threaded through and interwoven with the ‘real’, and the very concepts of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ become problematic1. This is the contextual backdrop to the analysis and discussion offered in this volume.
Journal of Pragmatics
Narrative of vicarious experience in broadcast news: A linguistic ethnographic approach to semiotic mediations in the newsroom2020 •
Cahiers de l'ILSL
Telling stories from the newsroom: A linguistic ethnographic account of dramatisation in broadcast news2018 •
Discourse Studies
Certainty and speculation in news reporting of the future: the execution of Timothy McVeigh2003 •
2004 •
2004 •
Discourse Studies
Certainty and Speculation In News Reporting of the Future: the Execution of Timothy McVeigh (2003) Discourse Studies Vol 5(1)2003 •
2011 •
Discourse & Communication
'This Poll Has Not Happened Yet': Temporal Play In Election Predictions (2008) Discourse and Communication.2008 •
Brno Studies in English
National Culture and the Thematic Structure of News Texts2013 •
Discourse & Society
Opening up terrorism talk: The sequential and categorical production of discursive power within the call openings of a talk radio broadcast2013 •
The Generic Identity of Narratives
The Language Narrative and its Generic Identity2011 •
Australian Journal of …
Branching Out: Ethnomethodological Approaches to Communication2010 •
Journal of Pragmatics
Toward a definition and classification of human interest narratives in television war reporting2011 •
Research Paper
"You've Been Framed!": Thematization and Ideological Bias in Arabic and English News Reports2020 •
Discourse & Society
Identity, Categorization and Sequential Organization: the Sequential and Categorial Flow of Identity In a Radio Phone-In. (2002) Discourse & Society2002 •
2009 •
Journalism Practice
Good Professional Reasons for Bad Journalism Practice: Inventing Audience Contributions in a Live Tv Debate. (2019) Journalism Practice. Burger and Fitzgerald.2019 •
2010 •
Australian Journal of Communication
Omnirelevance and interactional context2009 •
Discourse & Communication
Audience engagement in the discourse of TV news kernels: The case of BBC News at Ten2020 •