Reviews of The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness
In: CHOICEconnect, A publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, October 2017 Vol. 55 No. 2
In their timely, groundbreaking paperback, Bednarek (University of Sydney) and Caple (Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow) provide in-depth research into the ways the news media industry creates newsworthiness and value through text and imagery. Through excellent interdisciplinary empirical research and their unique analytical model DNVA (discursive news value analysis), the authors challenge traditional assumptions about news value and the ways media organizations and their representatives market contemporary events by giving them newsworthiness and economic value through the creative interplay of language and imagery. Integrating corpus linguistics and multi-modal discourse analysis and organizing the book’s ten chapters into four parts—“Theory,” “Analytical Frameworks,” “Empirical Analysis,” and “Extensions”—the authors use a series of case studies and a wide variety of global English media items, including today’s use of social media, to analyze and vividly evidence the impact and influence of words and visuals on the creation of value and news worthiness. Oriented to researchers and professional readers with expertise or specialty in areas such as linguistics, critical discourse, semiotics, communications, and journalism and media studies, the book is both thought provoking and a significant contribution to various fields of study.
—S. R. Kahn, University of Cincinnati
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.
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Praise for The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness
“Clearly written, rich in examples, and meticulous in its scholarship, this book introduces state of the art methods of news research and extends the linguistic analysis of news and news values to visual and digital news. It will be essential reading for students and researchers in media studies and discourse analysis alike.”
Theo van Leeuwen, Emeritus Professor, University of Technology Sydney
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“Continuing a large multidisciplinary research project on news discourse, Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple’s present study applies a unique combination of discourse analysis, semiotics, multimodal analysis and corpus linguistics in the study of news values. Both in theoretical and in practical analytical terms, and with concrete case studies, also of social media, they thus offer explicit and systematic insight into the criteria that define what is news. Their book also offers an excellent methodological introduction, for students of language, discourse and communication, into advanced methods of corpus-assisted multimodal analysis of the discourse and images of the news.”
Teun A. van Dijk, Professor of Discourse Studies, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
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“This is a timely, well-referenced and well-written book which fills a gap in the literature. The approach taken is up to date in terms of methods used, and covers a wide range of news media types from around the globe. The authors have picked interesting case studies and have an engaging writing style. It offers a significant original contribution.”
Paul Baker, Professor of Linguistics, Lancaster University
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