General
Which publication should I be reading first if I want to undertake DNVA myself?
If you are an undergraduate student, we recommend reading chapter 3 of our 2012 book News Discourse.
If you are a PhD student or other researcher, we recommend reading our 2017 book The Discourse of News Values. This is an updated version of our research that supersedes our early 2012 book. These readings can be followed by additional journal articles/book publications that explore particular facets of DNVA or apply/test specific analytical techniques (including corpus linguistic ones). See our PUBLICATIONS page.
Can DNVA be applied to any language?
The DNVA framework was developed based on the analysis of English-language news media. If you want to analyse news values in other languages, it is important not to assign primacy/universality to the English-language framework that we have developed. Rather, we make the following suggestions:
- Determine whether all of the news values in the DNVA framework are relevant to the specific newsroom/journalistic culture (e.g. via literature review, ethnographic research)
- If the news values are indeed found to be relevant, take the news values (not the linguistic resources) as starting point to independently develop an inventory of linguistic resources for the specific language.
See further chapter 9 of The Discourse of News Values and Caple, Huan & Bednarek 2020, Multimodal News Analysis across Cultures.
Can I use DNVA to analyse any media text (e.g. opinion texts, social media texts)?
No. Discursive news values analysis shows you how events/happenings/news actors are constructed as newsworthy in journalism. It should only be applied to news stories that report on newsworthy happenings (i.e. news). It should not be applied to opinion texts, analysis, letters to the editor, reader comments, or other texts that are not news. DNVA can be applied to different types of news stories (e.g. hard news, research news, business news), as long as the overall aim/goal of the news story is that there is an event/happening/issue/news actor that is constructed as newsworthy.
Can I invent new news values out of patterns I see in the photographs or language in my dataset? That is, can I add a new news value based on results from linguistic or semiotic analysis?
No. Such an attempt is unlikely to be valid or persuasive. Conceptualisations of newsworthiness and news values originated in the observation of professional journalistic practices/cultures over time. News values are professional values with material, cognitive, social and discursive dimensions (see further Chapter 2 in The Discourse of News Values). One cannot reduce news values to language and there are also values in news stories that have nothing to do with establishing newsworthiness. Our list of news values is based on a consensus in the relevant literature. We did not invent these news values ourselves – that is, we did not derive these values from linguistic or semiotic analysis but rather from the scholarly consensus.
What is the role of the audience in DNVA?
To analyse the news values that are constructed in news stories from a particular news publication, it is important to consider the news publication’s target audience. This is essential for analysing most, if not all news values. Consider for example Consonance – in order to understand whether news actors are constructed as (stereo-)typical you need to know the stereotypes the target audience is likely to hold about these news actors. For further examples, see Chapter 4 in The Discourse of News Values.
Do I always have to analyse all news values?
No. This depends on your research question. At times, it might be interesting to focus on specific news values. For example, you might be interested in analysing when and where Positivity is constructed as a news value. However, you should have a good reason for only focussing on one or more specific news values, and your analysis cannot then make any claims about the general construction of newsworthiness.
What is the relationship between DNVA and appraisal?
Discursive news values analysis is a discourse analytical framework developed for the analysis of news stories. Appraisal comes from the Systemic Functional Linguistic model of describing language and refers to a discourse semantic system to do with expressing evaluation (opinion, emotion, stance). Appraisal can be used to express all sorts of values/evaluation in different types of text. Discursive news values analysis only applies to the construction of news values (newsworthiness) in news reportage. News values can be constructed through evaluative language (appraisal), but news values are also constructed through other linguistic resources (e.g. tense, aspect, role labels, etc). See further chapter 4 of The Discourse of News Values.
Methods of analysis
Can I just analyse news values in texts manually (without using corpus linguistics)?
Yes. DNVA can be undertaken via close reading/manual analysis of individual (full) texts. It is a framework that can be used in ‘classical’ discourse analysis of news stories.
Can I just analyse news values using corpus linguistics?
Yes. DNVA can be undertaken using corpus linguistic techniques. Qualitative analysis must be integrated if you choose to do this. Previous corpus linguistic techniques that we ourselves have applied/trialled for DNVA include:
- frequency and keyness analysis of word forms, lemmas, n-grams, part-of-speech tags and semantic tags;
- collocation;
- word sketch analysis.
These studies confirm that qualitative analysis of concordance lines is vitally important when doing corpus linguistic DNVA. Knowing the contents and composition of your corpus is also crucial, especially when the corpus is very large and includes news articles from news publications with different ideological leanings, as knowing and understanding the target audience of a particular publication is an essential component of DNVA.
Language and Image (Multimodality)
Can I just analyse the language (without analysing news photos, typography, etc)?
Yes. If your research question is about the verbal text (language), you can do a linguistic analysis of news values. In addition, some news stories do not include any images. Often, the news databases from which you may retrieve your texts for analysis also do not include access to the relevant news photographs, so this can be a practical reason (especially for corpus linguistic research). However, you should be aware of the limitations of language only analysis, if the original text includes news photography.
Can I just analyse the photograph/s? Or do you need to read the caption (or other text) to analyse the photograph?
Yes, you can and should aim to analyse the photographs as photographs. If your research question is asking how an entity (event/issue/happening) is visually constructed as newsworthy, then you would necessarily analyse the photographic content and the visual devices deployed for the construction of news values. Ideally, you should be familiar enough with the cultural context in which the news is produced to be able to recognize and thus identify and code, for example, elite persons from that culture. And this should not be dependent on reading the caption or other attendant text.
However, it is possible to argue that one rarely encounters a news photograph without a caption, in which case the analyst may choose to treat the photograph and caption as a visual-verbal complex and analyse them together. In this case, the analyst should acknowledge where newsworthiness is constructed (visually or verbally or in both) and not overstate the newsworthiness in each mode.
Can I just analyse the headline and opening paragraph of a news story, rather than analysing the full text?
Yes, this is possible (for hard news stories), but will not show you which news values are constructed in the whole news story. However, headline and opening paragraph are generally considered as making up one unit within the traditional hard news story genre. This unit generically functions to frame the event, summarize the story, construe newsworthiness and attract readers. From a generic perspective, then, news values that are present in headline/OP (the ‘abstract’ or ‘nucleus’) may be regarded as particularly foregrounded. It is for this reason that their analysis can be useful.
Does every news photograph construct newsworthiness?
No. Just as with language/sentences/words, news photos don’t all construct newsworthiness. Stock photography taken from an image bank that is used to illustrate an article (e.g. depicting a plane flying through blue sky, a piece of machinery, an item of clothing, a food item) is unlikely to construct newsworthiness (see Chapter 7 of The Discourse of News Values for further discussion of generic photography).
Does every news photograph construct all news values?
No. No single photograph will construct all news values at once. However, certain news values are more likely to cluster together in certain kinds of photographs. For example, a photograph of the aftermath of a natural disaster is likely to construct Negativity, Impact and Superlativeness. But one photograph can never construct all news values at the same time.
Visit the EXTENSIONS page for more ideas and information.
How to cite this page:
Caple, H. and Bednarek, M. (2022) ‘Troubleshooting’ Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA). https://www.newsvaluesanalysis.com/troubleshooting/