The discourse of news values : how news organizations create newsworthiness

Abstract

The Discourse of News Values breaks new ground in news media research in offering the first book-length treatment of the discursive construction of news values through words and images. Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed empirical analysis to introduce their innovative analytical framework: discursive news values analysis (DNVA). DNVA allows researchers to systematically investigate how reported events are "sold" to audiences as "news" (made newsworthy) through the semiotic resources of language and image. With an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach, The Discourse of News Values analyzes authentic news discourse (both language and images) from around the English-speaking world through three new case studies: one that analyzes newsworthiness around the topic of cycling/cyclists, another that analyzes news values in images disseminated by news media organizations via Facebook, and a third that focuses on news values in "most shared" news items. Introducing readers to the possibilities of both DNVA and corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (CAMDA), The Discourse of News Values brings together corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis in a stimulating and unique book for researchers in Linguistics, Semiotics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Media/Journalism Studies.