Discourse, Context and Media 11 (2016) 1–2 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Discourse, Context and Media journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dcm Introduction/overview The idea for this special themed edition of Discourse, Context & Media grew out of a symposium that was co-hosted and co-funded by Griffith University’s School of Humanities and CQUniversity in April 2014. The symposium was prompted by an earlier workshop we held in 2012, which focused on the theme of disaster talk. After the 2012 symposium we felt that we had more work to do on the theme of media talk and hence the seeds for the 2014 symposium with its theme of media talk, were planted. The media talk symposium, held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, featured the three internationally recognised ‘forefathers’ of broadcast media talk, Paddy Scannell, Andrew Tolson and Martin Montgomery. It was great to have three distinguished leaders in the media talk field together in Brisbane. We were joined by scholars from a variety of disciplines, with the common link being that we were all researching discursive aspects of talk that occurs in and through various forms of media, including broadcast, print, online and social media. Participants presented their works in progress at the two-day event. The symposium was designed so that presenters received extensive feedback on their works in progress and the collegiality and generosity of the participants and presenters was much appreciated. A number of common threads emerged from the symposium, including news media talk and so we invited those participants whose papers fitted that theme to submit their papers for consideration for this special themed edition of Discourse, Context & Media. We thank the authors for their contributions to this special issue, and also those who attended the symposium for their generous suggestions and engagement in symposium discussions. Daniel Angus, Richard Fitzgerald, Christina Knuepffer, and Janet Wiles examine way different genres of interviewing are drawn upon within one interview. Rather than treating interviews as being of a particular genre the authors examine the way an interviewer employs techniques from different genres to produce a hybrid form of interviewing. Drawing on a corpus of 101 interviews from a single television program, the authors employ the visual text analytics software Discursis to track and trace the genre shifts within single interviews. The authors then demonstrate how visual text analytics software can provide qualitative researchers with a tool with the ability to telescopically zoom in and out from single turns to whole interviews and large data bases thereby providing visual representations of whole interviews at-a-glance as well as the ability to focus into particular sections for closer discourse analysis. Andrew Tolson’s article is a fascinating exploration of the way hosts of an afternoon sports programme broadcast in the UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2015.12.001 2211-6958/& 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. successfully create a program in the absence of the televised event. He argues that it has a paradoxical televisual structure, which is based on sociable argument, report, and commentary. Tolson’s analysis specifically explores the use of tense in narrative re-telling, which is achieved collaboratively by a panel of hosts (or sports ‘pundits’, as referred to by Tolson). The significance of this paper is its exploration of a hybrid form of broadcasting – a sports report that is achieved without the televised broadcast of the sporting event itself – as a distinctive communicative ethos. It is a style of television that has become increasingly common in a broadcast environment that restricts televised rights to sporting events and Tolson’s analysis of the commentary-based approach to programming makes an important contribution to our understanding of emerging forms of broadcast talk. Sean Rintel, Dan Angus and Richard Fitzgerald examine the creation and diffusion of a news story as it evolves through various forms of traditional and social media. Examined through the lens of mediatization the paper traces how a video of a ‘behind the scenes’ pool news interview, known as the ‘Miliband Loop’, first became a news story before then going onto examine the different ways the story was engaged with through forms of social media. The authors first examine the event as a glimpse of the symbiotic mediatized relationship between political public relations and journalism through the practical production of the pool interview as a ‘delaminated’ form of interview. From this traditional news event the authors then use a combination of analytic and visualization methods to examine the ways in which mediatization issues diffuse through different media platforms as well as observe the ways in which themes evolve, morph and coalesce. In doing this the authors highlight how as forms of media evolve the mediatization of politics itself increasingly diffuses online. Kate Ames examines the way a host on a talk-based panel show orients to different roles as a facilitator in a multi-party talk setting. Using the prominent Australian talk show Q&A as a case study, she provides evidence of the way a skilled host can shift between being a host and a journalist, responding and adapting on a turn by turn basis to guests and audiences. She examines the influence of context on political talk, and demonstrates the way the host attempts to elicit news out of conversational talk. Her examples highlight the hybridity of this type of talk, which is situated as political discourse but is also potentially news and aims to entertain. The article examines the specific techniques used by someone recognised as a skilled journalist and host and argues that these are a model for practice for broadcast hosts in similar settings. Jacqui Ewart, Hamish McLean and Kate Ames examine the performance of political actors during disasters by exploring the 2 Introduction/overview / Discourse, Context and Media 11 (2016) 1–2 perspectives of emergency managers. This paper bases its discussion on interviews with senior emergency managers in several countries, whereby the authors explore emergency manager’s views on performance, interactivity and liveliness as they apply to political actors’ communication with their publics before, during and after disasters. The paper explores the tension between those working at an operational level, and those who are engaging with the media as spokespersons. While emergency managers recognise that politicians need to interact with the media to demonstrate leadership and express of care and concern for those affected, they also noted that the demands of politicians to appear interact, perform, and appear ‘lively’ when a disaster occurred involved highly constructed activities that required resources and time, often diverted from the response effort. The most significant advice to politicians from the study participants is that their interactions via the news media and directly with people affected by disasters has major ramification for emergency management processes, and so they would be well advised to carefully consider their roles in light of the findings of this study. The paper’s findings have significance for politicians and those charged with managing disasters. Monika Bednarek takes an unusual and potentially contentious approach to the issue of news values. Her paper provides a new way of analysing news media talk through a focus on, and a reconsideration of, news values particularly those evidence in broadcast talk. Her approach might cause some disconcert for those not familiar with the media talk area, particularly those who have invested much in the traditional approach to news values. The paper focuses on how text and talk construct newsworthiness, rather than why something ‘becomes’ newsworthy. The framework she provides in this paper has potential for application in other contexts such as analysis of multimodal meaning construction. The significance of the Bednarek’s approach is its combining of news values analysis with attribution analysis to provide in depth insights into journalistic outputs. The author acknowledges that factors other than language, which is the focus of her analysis, influence the construction of news and that such constructions vary across media. Finally, the co-editors thank the former editor of DC&M Greg Myers with whom we initially discussed our proposal for this themed edition, and the current editor Ruth Page who has seen it through to publication, as well as the production staff of the journal. Jacqui Ewart Griffith University, Australia Kate Ames CQ University, Australia Richard Fitzgerald University of Macau, PR China