Abstract
Linguist Monika Bednarek, a co-investigator on the Sharing News Online team, uses computational techniques to examine how the language of most shared news stories from legacy media sites constructs newsworthiness, providing insights into how news might be packaged for an era of social sharing. Using a discursive news values analysis (DNVA) she finds that stories exhibiting unexpected and negative news value are more likely to be shared, as well as those that evoke strong emotions. In doing so she considers the risks that this language can be used in the amplification of misinformation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
News Corp Australia’s site news.com.au was also included, bringing together reporting from their print newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail and Herald Sun.
- 2.
In addition to the manual annotation, Hs and OPs were also analysed using corpus linguistic software, as reported in Bednarek and Caple (2017).
- 3.
The USAS category of Evaluation includes ‘evaluative terms’ depicting quality, truth, accuracy and authenticity (Archer et al. 2002: 5–6), but is not further explained. The difference between negative evaluative language, reference to negative emotion/attitude and negative lexis in Table 6.1 is that evaluative language expresses opinion, while emotion references label emotional experiences, and negative lexis concerns the use of vocabulary to describe negative events without automatically indicating writer dis/approval (see further Bednarek and Caple 2012, 2017).
- 4.
I categorised WEEK as a pointer to Timeliness but not YEAR or MONTH, on the assumption that references to last/this year/month, for example, would in most cases refer to a point in time too far removed from the time of publication to emphasise the Timeliness of the constructed event.
- 5.
In including all these items here (various intensifiers, quantifiers [including numerals], focusing subjuncts, comparison, the noun WORLD and the bigram the world), I have been less conservative than with other news values, as some of these can function in different ways (e.g. so can be a conjunction as well as an intensifier).
- 6.
Consonance concerns the construction of stereotypes, but it is difficult for the analyst to know the stereotypes held by the target audience of any particular publication. Therefore, a very conservative approach was adopted to the coding of this news value, in that the ‘possible’ option was always chosen.
- 7.
Brackets have been used in the ‘word form/lemma/n-grams’ column to identify questionable pointers, which certainly only construe the respective news value in certain co-texts.
- 8.
Proximity also emerges as important if cultural references are included (see Bednarek and Caple 2017).
- 9.
Further, surveys where respondents identify to what extent they are interested in or consume different types of news (such as science/technology, health/education, entertainment/celebrity) clearly show variation, with some influence of age and gender (Levy and Newman 2014; Anderson and Caumont 2014). However, what respondents say they are interested in may not be identical to the types of news they actually view or share, and results may be different if only social media users are questioned (see Anderson and Caumont 2014 on what types of news Facebook users regularly see, and Bruns et al. 2013 on Australian news topics that receive attention from Twitter users).
References
Allcott, H., and M. Gentzkow. 2017. Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Journal of Economic Perspectives 31 (2): 211–236.
Anderson, M., and A. Caumont. 2014. How Social Media Is Reshaping News. Pew Research Center Fact Tank, September 24. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/. Accessed 10 April 2015.
Archer, D., A. Wilson, and P. Rayson. 2002. Introduction to the USAS Category System. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/usas guide.pdf.
Bednarek, M. 2006. Evaluation in Media Discourse. Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London/New York: Continuum.
———. 2015a. Voices and Values in the News: News Media Talk, News Values and Attribution. Discourse, Context, Media.
———. 2015b. Coding Manual. https://www.newsvaluesanalysis.com/our-book/.
———. 2016. Investigating Evaluation and News Values in News Items That Are Shared Via Social Media. Corpora 11 (2): 227–257.
Bednarek, M., and H. Caple. 2012. News Discourse. London/New York: Continuum.
———. 2014. Why Do News Values Matter? Towards a New Methodological Framework for Analyzing News Discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and Beyond. Discourse & Society 25 (2): 135–158.
———. 2017. The Discourse of News Values: How News Organisations Create Newsworthiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bell, A. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Berger, J. 2011. Arousal Increases Social Transmission of Information. Psychological Science 22 (7): 891–893.
Berger, J., and K.L. Milkman. 2011. What Makes Online Content Viral. Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print, pp. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.10.0353.
Blom, J.N., and K.R. Hansen. 2015. Click Bait: Forward-Reference as Lure in Online News Headlines. Journal of Pragmatics 76: 87–100.
Bruns, A., T. Highfield, and S. Harrington. 2013. Sharing the News: Dissemination of Links to Australian News Sites on Twitter. In Br(e)aking the News. Journalism, Politics and New Media, ed. J. Gordon, P. Rowinski, and G. Stewart, 181–209. Bern/New York: Peter Lang.
Caple, H., and M. Bednarek. 2013. Delving into the Discourse: Approaches to News Values in Journalism Studies and Beyond. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The University of Oxford. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Delving%20into%20the%20Discourse_0.pdf.
Crawford, H., D. Filipovic, and A. Hunter. 2015. All Your Friends Like This: How Social Networks Took Over News. Sydney: Harper Collins.
Duguid, A. 2010. Newspaper Discourse Informalisation: A Diachronic Comparison from Keywords. Corpora 5 (2): 109–138.
Galtung, J., and M.H. Ruge. 1965. The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research 2 (1): 64–91.
Hansen, L.K., A. Arvidsson, F. Å. Nielsen, E. Colleoni, M. Etter. 2011. Good Friends, Bad News: Affect and Virality in Twitter. Paper Presented at The 2011 International Workshop on Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2011), Loutraki, Crete, Greece.
Harcup, T., and D. O’Neill. 2017. What Is News? News Values Revisited (Again). Journalism Studies 18 (12): 1470–1488.
Herdağdelen, Amaç, Wenyun Zuo, Alexander Gard-Murray, and Yaneer Bar-Yam. 2013. An Exploration of Social Identity: The Geography and Politics of News-Sharing Communities in Twitter. Complexity 19 (2): 10–20.
Hermida, Alfred, Fred Fletcher, Darryl Korell, and Donna Logan. 2012. Share, Like, Recommend. Journalism Studies 13 (5): 815–824.
Iedema, R., S. Feez, and P. White. 1994. Media Literacy. Sydney: Disadvantaged Schools Program, N.S.W. Department of School Education.
Lazer, D., Baum, M., Grinber, N., Friedland, L., Joseph, K., Hobbs, W., and Mattsson, C. 2017, May. Combating Fake News: An Agenda for Research and Action. Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Combating-Fake-News-Agenda-for-Research-1.pdf.
Lee, C.S., and L. Ma. 2012. News Sharing in Social Media: The Effect of Gratifications and Prior Experience. Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2): 331–339.
Levy, David, and Nic Newman. 2014. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2014. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Ma, Long, Chei Sian Lee, and Dion Hoe-Lian Goh. 2014. Understanding News Sharing in Social Media. Online Information Review 38 (5): 598–615.
Mahlberg, M., and O’Donnell, M.B. 2008. A Fresh View of the Structure of Hard News Stories. In S. Neumann and E. Steiner (eds.). Online Proceedings of the 19th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference and Workshop, Saarbrücken, 23–25 July 2007. http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2008/1700.
Newman, N. 2011. Mainstream Media and the Distribution of News in the Age of Social Discovery. University of Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, September 2011. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Mainstream%20media%20and%20the%20distribution%20of%20news%20in%20the%20age%20of%20social%20discovery.pdf.
Newman, N., R. Fletcher A. Kalogeropoulos, D.A. Levy, and R. Kleis Nielsen. 2017. Digital News Report 2017. University of Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/.
O’Donnell, M. 2015. UAM Corpus Tool. Version 3.2. http://www.wagsoft.com/CorpusTool/download.html.
Olmstead, Kenny, Amy Mitchell, and Tom Rosenstiel. 2011. Navigating News Online: Where People Go, How They Get There and What Lures Them Away. Pew’s Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/navigating_news_online. Accessed 25 August 2013.
Papacharissi, Zizi, and Maria de Fatima Oliveira. 2012. Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt. Journal of Communication 62 (2): 266–282.
Potts, A. 2013. At Arm’s Length: Methods of Investigating Constructions of the ‘Other’ in American Disaster and Disease Reporting. Ph.D. Thesis, Lancaster University, UK.
Potts, A., M. Bednarek, and H. Caple. 2015. How Can Computer-Based Methods Help Researchers to Investigate News Values in Large Datasets? A Corpus Linguistic Study of the Construction of Newsworthiness in the Reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Discourse & Communication 9 (2): 149–172.
Scott, M. (2015). Wordsmith (Version 6.0.0.235 – 2/08/2015). [Computer Software]. http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/.
van Dijk, T. 1988. News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Walsh, J. (2014). That Story About Irish Babies Buried in a Septic Tank Was Shocking. It Also Wasn’t Entirely True. New Republic, June 24. https://newrepublic.com/article/118316/800-irish-babies-buried-septic-tank-was-partly-bogus-story. Accessed 2 January 2017.
Wasike, B.S. 2013. Framing News in 140 Characters: How Social Media Editors Frame the News and Interact with Audiences Via Twitter. Global Media Journal – Canadian Edition 6 (1): 5–23.
Weeks, B.E., and R.L. Holbert. 2013. Predicting Dissemination of News Content in Social Media: A Focus on Reception, Friending and Partisanship. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90 (2): 212–232.
White, P.R.R. 1997. Death, Disruption and the Moral Order: The Narrative Impulse in Mass Media “Hard News” Reporting. In Genres and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School, ed. F. Christie and J.R. Martin, 101–133. London: Cassell.
Zeller, Frauke, Joshua O’Kane, Elizabeth Godo, and Abby Goodrum. 2013. A Subjective User-Typology of Online News Consumption. Digital Journalism 2: 214–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2013.801686.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bednarek, M. (2019). The Language and News Values of ‘Most Highly Shared’ News. In: Sharing News Online. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17906-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17906-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17905-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17906-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)