18Media Discourse
Abstract: This chapter offers an overview of trends in research on discourse in the broadcast and print media, with a special focus on news media discourse and newswriting in particular. Drawing on a case study of newswriting (henceforth Leba case) at Swiss national television, it first outlines an interdisciplinary approach to media discourse at the intersection of individual and social language use (Part 1). Second, it explains social and cognitive perspectives onto media discourse in general and newswriting in particular (2). Third, it provides exemplary insights into four types of research methods for the analysis of media discourse, especially in the field of newswriting (3). Finally, it discusses the value that multi-perspective approaches can add to both theory and practice of media discourse (4).81
Keywords: media, broadcast media, print media, newswriting
1Case study: An interdisciplinary approach to newswriting
In this section, I first outline an interdisciplinary approach to media discourse that combines perspectives from journalism studies and media linguistics (Part 1.1). Second, I introduce the practical examples (1.2) that I will use throughout the article to explain concepts such as recontextualization (1.3) and emergence (1.4) – key concepts at the interface of social and cognitive language use in media discourse.
1.1Combining perspectives from journalism studies and media linguistics
Both journalism studies and media linguistics deal with public discourse: first, with the production and reception of communicational offers; second, with the products themselves; and third, with the setting that this communication influences and is influenced by. Interdisciplinary cooperation is a logical consequence (Figure 1):
By doing so, the two disciplines complement each other in their epistemological interests and methods: journalism studies in the tradition of communication studies (e.g., Roe 2003; but see Richardson 2008) primarily seek to establish the general validity of its findings with statistical probability. This entails broad surveys with little effort applied to the individual cases. Media linguistics, on the other hand, often seeks to discover regularities in language-based constructions of meaning even in individual cases in a detailed, precise, and conclusive manner. It then argues for the significance of its findings in terms of relevance and plausibility, as opposed to statistics. For systematic generalization, such approaches often include procedures from the research tradition of grounded theory (e.g., Charmaz 2008; Glaser & Holton 2004).
With an interdisciplinary approach, journalism studies and media linguistics can, for example, do broad-based research into how political demonstrations in the Middle East generally are framed in media discourse. On the other hand, a few deep insights into newswriting processes can provide evidence that experienced journalists are able to abandon stereotypes, for example by working carefully with linguistic means and by re-contextualizing pictures in a different way from their colleagues. This is what the journalist in Leba case does, as could be shown in the Idée suisse research project of which this case study is part. In the next paragraphs, I outline the case and the entire research project; throughout the chapter then, I use them to illustrate some of the theoretical concepts and approaches to media discourse, such as the recontextualization and emergence.
1.2Leba and Idée suisse as practical examples
Public service broadcasting companies are among the most important broadcasting companies in Europe. The Swiss public broadcaster, SRG SSR, has the highest ratings in the country. As a public service institution, SRG has a federal, societal, cultural, and linguistic mandate to fulfill: promote social integration by promoting public understanding (Swiss Confederation, 2006). As a media enterprise, though, SRG is subject to market and competitive forces. Losing audience would mean losing public importance and legitimacy for public funding. The Idée suisse research project investigated how those working for the broadcaster deal with these two key expectations they experience as basically contradictory.
Epistemologically, the researchers aimed at reconstructing Promoting public understanding as the interplay of situated linguistic activity and social structures. The research question and the theoretical approach led to four project modules, focusing on media policy (module A), media management (B), media production (C), and media reflection (D). The result of this procedure was a detailed insight into stakeholders’ conflicting expectations and stances. Media policy expects public media to promote public understanding through their communicational offers, whereas media management considers implementing the mandate as infeasible or irrelevant in the face of market pressures. Grounded in these data, the mid-range theory of Promoting public understanding was developed (Perrin 2013: 8).
A key inference from this theory is that, for the case of SRG SSR, if solutions of bringing together public and market demands cannot be revealed in the management suites of the organization, they have to be looked for in the newsrooms. This meant a focus on journalistic practices in the second phase of the project. In module D (i.e. journalists’ metadiscourse) verbal data were analyzed, just as in modules A and B. Module C (i.e. journalists’ media production) however, focused on observable text production activity. 120 newswriting processes were analyzed and contextualized with knowledge about: explicit editorial norms of text production; writers’ individual and organizational situations; and writers’ individual and shared language awareness. One example of this linguistic newsroom ethnography is the Leba case.
The Leba case concerns the issue of ethnic and religious diversity as well as expansion plans of neighboring countries repeatedly threatening national unity in Lebanon. In 2005, the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, was killed in a bomb attack, and on February 14, 2007, the second anniversary of the assassination was commemorated with a national demonstration in Beirut. Télévision Suisse Romande started covering the topic in the noon issue of Téléjournal. While European media often report on politically motivated violence in Lebanon, the journalist R. G. highlighted peaceful aspects of the demonstrations in his news item. The Leba case illustrates the medialinguistic key concept of recontextualization (Part 1.2). Also and more importantly, it documents the emergence and implementation of the idea to change one particular word and use it as a leitmotif (1.3).
1.3Focus on recontextualization
A first detail from the Leba case that matters for the present chapter is the intertextual chain the journalist R. G. draws on. In his new item, R. G. integrates quotes, utterances from protesters in Lebanon, which are recorded by a video journalist (VJ) and then selected and modified by, first, a Lebanese television station; second, a global news agency; third, Téléjournal, a station of Swiss national TV SRG SSR (Figure 2). Step by step, the utterance is recontextualized, shifted from one context to another. In this process, the semiotic means the protester used to express her stance is repeatedly reconstructed and thus nested in textual and communicative environments. These environments are influenced by agents and their stance(s) throughout the media system (Perrin 2012).
1.4Focus on emergence
A second relevant detail from the Leba case is the emergence of a leitmotif during newswriting. At the 9:30 morning conference of the Téléjournal newsroom team on February 14, 2007, R. G. received the assignment to prepare an item about demonstrations in Lebanon for the noon edition of the Téléjournal. He found the deadline tight, which helped make him concentrate on the main topic: tens of thousands of demonstrators from all over Lebanon streaming into Beirut on the second anniversary of the killing of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. They were protesting against the possibility of renewed civil war that would partition their country among neighboring countries and, above all, Syria’s influence. So far there had been no violence.
In an early phase in the writing process, R. G. wrote the voiceover for an introductory scene. The scene shows how people traveled en masse to the demonstration by boat. Finding these boats in the video material surprised him, he says. In his very first sentence, R. G. refers to another fact new to him: as he just learns from the news service, the Lebanese had that day off. So the beginning of the product was shaped by details that were new to the experienced journalist. He then took a closer look at the pictures that were new to him and made a revision of a word that turned out to be the pivot point of the whole writing process.
In the first sentence of the second paragraph, R. G. had first talked about an expressway to describe the direct route over the Mediterranean sea, “la voie express de la méditerrannée”. While interweaving the text with the images, R. G. realized that a tranquil path, “la voie tranquille”, would better fit the slow journey of a boat. So he deleted “express” and inserted “tranquille” instead. A notational system for writing processes, called S-notation (e.g., Severinson-Eklundh & Kollberg 1996), represents these changes by indicating deletions in [square brackets] and insertions in {curly braces} (Figure 3).
With “tranquille” R. G. found the leitmotif of his item. In the retrospective verbal protocol recorded after the writing process, R. G. says that he loves the adjective because it corresponds not only to the image of the boats but also to the tranquility of the demonstration. He expects the “tranquil” to resonate in the minds of the audience. Just as consciously, he talks about using the term “drapeau libanais”, the Lebanese flag, as a symbol of the demonstrators’ desire for political independence.
In sum, R. G. overcame the critical situation of using brash stereotypes when under time pressure. Instead of catering to the market and resorting to predictable images that could overshadow publicly relevant developments, he absorbed his source material, listened to what was being said, and discerned what was important in the pictures. By doing so, he was able to discover a gentle approach to the topic that allowed him to produce a coherent and fresh story and at the same time managed to reflect the political finesse required by his TV station’s mandate of promoting public understanding. By changing one word, he initiated fundamental changes to his contribution to media discourse.
2Theory: Social and cognitive aspects of media discourse
Media discourse as a formal object of study differs from discipline to discipline, and approach to approach. Depending on epistemological interests, it has been conceptualized, for example, as mental processing (Part 2.1), language use (2.2), writing at work (2.3), and journalistic communication (2.4). Taken together, such perspectives point at a gap to be closed by integral analyses of specific activities within media discourse, such as newswriting (2.5).
2.1Media discourse as mental processing
At the mental interface, communicative activities such as writing and reading or speaking and listening interact with thinking and feeling, as referred to in concepts such as cognition, affect, emotion, motivation, involvement, interest, attitude, and stance. These concepts partly overlap in their use, both in research in general and in research into media discourse. In any case, they refer to mental states and activities that have long been considered as being located within human bodies. As internal states and activities, they are not directly accessible for research.
However, due to ecological interconnection, internal processing is densely coupled with external processing, such as “the creation and manipulation of written vehicles” (Menary 2007: 622), which both influences and is influenced by mental processes. It is this deep interconnection that allows researchers to both access mental activity through writing, e.g., in media discourse, and elaborate their knowledge about mental contributions to media discourse through theorizing mental activity. Key approaches of research into cognitive and affective mental activities include:
–Writing is evoked and structured by thoughts – but it also evokes and restructures thoughts. Having long been considered a form and substitute of speech and a tool for fixing (mnemotechnical function) and trading knowledge (communicative function), writing was recognized as “an active and powerful cultural agency in its own right” (Harris 1989, 99) in the 1970s (e.g., McLuhan 1964). The power that literacy adds to language in societies is far more than accumulation and communication of knowledge. Literacy allows for epistemic writing, thinking with writing tools (Ortner 2000) on both individual and social levels. It allows for enhanced, “chirographic” (Molitor-Lübbert 2002: 46) thinking in interaction with an emerging text – and it fosters shared interactive knowledge building (e.g., Goody 2001; Menary 2007).
–Not only is writing influenced by affective and emotional states, it also influences writers’ feelings. Whereas researchers still debate about “[h]ow to define emotions scientifically” (Scarantino 2012: 358; see also Dixon 2012 or Izard 2010), research has long explained writing as an “affective experience” (Brand 1989). One of the early investigations shows that emotions from former writing processes are brought into a new writing project like a mortgage, influencing writers’ confidence and motivation throughout the process: “Emotions are involved in mobilizing for writing and sustaining it” (Brand & Powell 1986). Such insights led and still lead to numerous educational studies of “developing motivation to write” (Bruning & Horn 2000: 25, see also, e.g., Hidi & Boscolo 2006: 2006; Fartoukh, Chanquoy & Piolat 2012).
Case studies such as Leba offer in-depth insights into the role of emotions in the collaborative production of multimodal contributions to media discourse. To explore how professionals feel about their writing and, in particular, how their feelings about it develop in situ is bound to provide new, deeper insights into critical situations of communicating verbally.
2.2Media discourse as language use
In the semiotic understanding of the term, even animals and computers communicate with languages. Linguistics, on the other hand, concentrates on human language, which it understands as human competence, a sign system, and individual utterances. Thus, linguistics reconstructs its material object in three formal “objects of linguistics” (Saussure 1916).
Language is, first, the capacity of people to guide cognitive and communicative processes with verbal signs; second, a system of verbal signs that, third, serves as a basis for a linguistic community’s concrete expression of units of a language. Linguists have conceptualized their object of study as a system of signs used for communication (e.g., Sapir 1921); as the entirety of all possible utterances in a language community (e.g., Bloomfield 1926); as the set of sentences in a formal system (Chomsky 1957); or as an “activity basically of four kinds: speaking, listening, writing and reading“ (Halliday, McIntosh & Strevens 1964, 9).
–In terms of human capacity, language is the genetically-determined, neurophysiologically-based talent of people to communicate and think linguistically. By using language, all humans are capable of exchanging information about things that are far beyond the immediate communication situation. An example from the Leba case are the demonstrations which took place in another part of the world and referred to events from another point in time.
–In terms of a system of verbal signs, language is what is used for communication by a particular community. The media item in the Leba case draws on two quotes, one in Arabic and one in English, both translated into German for the target audience of the news program.
–In terms of concrete traces of “using language” (Clark 1996), language consists of utterances and material representations. “Voie tranquille”, the tranquil way as a leitmotif by the Leba journalist, represents a stretch of language, a nominal phrase consisting of two short words, a total of fourteen characters and one blank, written and spoken on February 14, 2007. However, what language use means in contexts such as “human knowledge”, the “understanding of social action” and the “mediation of social relations” (Sealey & Carter 2004: 44), needs to be clarified.
Researching language use means first and foremost examining stretches of verbal signs. They are the result of language use and form the basis for new language use. That is how language production, products and comprehension interact as “structured social contexts within which people seek to pursue their interests” (Sealey & Carter 2004: 18). The processes of language use can be investigated as individual cognitive activity, as social activity, or as socio-cognitive activity (Figure 4).
For the leitmotif and the quote in the Leba case, this four-fold approach to language (e.g., Brumfit 2001: 55–56; Cicourel 1975; Filliettaz 2002; Leont’ev 1971; Vygotsky 1978) means:
–As stretches of language used, the quotes of the leitmotif appear in a news item and are implicitly or explicitly related to former texts and contexts. Whereas the audience can see and hear where the quotes come from, most of them will not link the tranquil way to express way, which is what the boat connection is called in the region the item reports on.
–As cognitively based activity, the use of the leitmotif provides evidence of the journalist’s professional biography and knowledge about dramaturgy, stereotypes, metaphors, and the region his item covers.
–As a socially-based activity, the use of the leitmotif and the journalist’s reflections show that other journalists reproduce narratives and stereotypes, in this case about the violence in Lebanon. An analysis of mainstream media discourse about this topic would provide similar results.
–As an individually reflected socio-cognitive activity, finally, the use of the leitmotif and the approval of it in the subsequent newsroom conference show how individuals can willingly vary or even start to change the narratives reproduced in newsrooms and societies.
2.3Media discourse as writing at work
Writing research conceptualizes writing as the production of texts, as cognitive problem solving (e.g., Cooper & Matsuhashi 1983), and as the collaborative practice of social meaning making (e.g., Gunnarsson 1997; Prior 2006). It investigates writing through laboratory experiments and field research. The experimental research explains cognitive activities such as micro pauses for planning (e.g., Torrance 2008). The field studies provide knowledge about writing processes in settings such as school and professions. The present state of research results from two paradigm shifts (e.g., Schultz 2006).
–In a first paradigm shift, the focus of interest moved from the product to the process. Researchers started to go beyond final text versions and authors’ subjective reports about their writing experience (e.g., Hodge 1979; Pitts 1982). Draft versions from different stages in a writing process were compared. Manuscripts were analyzed for traces of revision processes, such as cross-outs and insertions. This approach is still practiced in the field of literary writing, where archival research reveals the genesis of masterpieces (e.g., Bazerman 2008; Grésillon 1997).
–A second paradigm shift took research from the laboratory to “real life” (Van der Geest 1996). Researchers moved from testing subjects with experimental tasks (e.g., Rodriguez & Severinson-Eklundh 2006) to workplace ethnography (e.g., Bracewell 2003), for example to describe professionals’ writing expertise (e.g., Beaufort 2005: 210). Later, ethnography was complemented by recordings of writing activities (e.g., Latif 2008), such as keylogging. The first multimethod approach that combined ethnography and keylogging at the workplace was progression analysis (Perrin 2003).
Writing research in the field of media discourse sees newswriting as a reproductive process in which professionals contribute to glocalized (Khondker 2004) news flows by transforming source texts into public target texts. This happens at collaborative digital workplaces (e.g., Hemmingway 2007), in highly standardized formats and timeframes, and in recursive phases such as goal setting, planning, formulating, revising, and reading. Conflicts between routine and creativity, or speed and accuracy, are to be expected (Ruhmann & Perrin 2002).
Based on such knowledge from writing research, writing education develops contextualized models of good writing practice, evaluates competence according to these models, and designs writing courses (e.g., Jakobs & Perrin 2008; Jones & Stubbe 2004; Olson 1987; Surma 2000).
2.4Media discourse as journalistic communicational offer
Communication and media studies foreground the media aspect of discourse and reflect on the nature of the media concept in general. In a very broad view, many things can serve as a medium in communication: a sound wave carrier such as the air, a status symbol such as a car, or a system of signs such as the English language. In a stricter sense, a medium is a technical means or instrument to produce, store, reproduce, and transmit signs. However, this definition is still very broad. Media could mean all technical communication media such as postcards, the intranet, and even a public address system. Every form of communication except face-to-face conversations uses such technical tools.
–Media in a stricter sense can mean news media, for example. A news medium is a technical means used to produce and publish communicative offers of public importance (such as news pieces) under economic conditions (e.g., Luhmann 1996). News medium is socially, economically, and communicatively more strictly defined than medium.
–Communicative offers of public importance contribute to the production of public knowledge and understanding in societies whose “institutions of opinion” (Myers 2005) reach far. Abandoning the stereotype of violent people in Lebanon, and realizing that demonstrations there can be tranquil and peaceful, fosters social understanding in a regionally (e.g., Androutsopoulos 2010) and globally (e.g., Blommaert 2010) connected world.
–Economic conditions means the obligation to create value as a “constrained author” (Reich 2010) in work-sharing, technology-based (e.g., Pavlik 2000; Plesner 2009), and routinized (e.g., Berkowitz 1992) production processes (e.g., Baisnée & Dominique 2006). The protesters’ quotes go through an intertextual chain of economic value production. At each station, journalists select source materials, revise them, and sell them to new addressees.
−To publish means the professional activity of disseminating “content” (e.g., Carpentier & De Cleen 2008) outside of the production situation, to audiences unknown as individuals. The Téléjournal newsroom addresses an audience that can only be described statistically, using sampling techniques and projections.
2.5Media discourse as newswriting
The main disciplines involved in the analysis of media discourse production – linguistics, writing research, and journalism studies – point at a gap to be closed by an interdisciplinary applied linguistics of newswriting: investigating “the role of the practitioner in the production of news language, an approach largely absent from existing linguistic research” (Cotter 2010: 1). Put simply, this means finding out what journalists want to do and what they actually do when writing their contributions to media discourse, and why they do it: their strategies, practices, routines, and procedures (Figure 5).
Situated activity here means doing media discourse as an individual and collective in multi-layered social contexts of newsrooms, media organizations, news flows, and society at large. Such situated activity manifests itself in dynamic entities of text production (e.g., Lillis 2008: 374). Strategies represent potential dynamics, whereas practices, routines, and procedures represent actual dynamics (e.g., Bisaillon 2007).
Writing strategies can be defined as the reinforced, conscious, and therefore articulable idea of how decisions are to be made during the act of writing so that the writing process or text product has a great probability of fulfilling the intended function (e.g., Perrin 2011: 1868). Strategies are recursive: they can contain sub-strategies. Individuals and collectives dispose of and apply repertoires of writing strategies: the sets of strategies available when writing, for example when recontextualizing quotes for new contributions to media discourse.
In contrast to strategies, practices refer to actual activity. The data format of strategies is [do X because Y is true], of practices it is only [do X]. Routines are automated practices, and procedures are institutionalized routines: the activities one normally performs unconsciously as a member of a social group such as a newsroom team, such as using pictures showing violence when reporting from a place in the world one considers to be dominated by violence.
3Methodology: Four complementary methods
When focusing on newswriting, the analysis of media discourse needs research methods to generate data about writing activities in complex contexts. The next sections present four prototype methods applied in the research of newswriting, using them as examples of how to investigate media discourse as a window onto cognitive and societal structures and processes. These methods are: version analysis (Part 3.1), progression analysis (3.2), variation analysis (3.3), and metadiscourse analysis (3.4). In media discourse analyses, such methods are often triangulated in a multimethod approach (4).
3.1Tracking intertextual chains with version analysis
Analysts of verbal communication investigate first and foremost stretches of language, i.e. linguistic products (e.g., McCarthy 2001: 115). From this product perspective (see above, Part 2.2), a media linguistics that focuses on what is special in newswriting will emphasize the intertextual chains within news flows: new texts are quickly and constantly created from earlier ones. What happens to the linguistic products in this process can be determined with version analysis.
Version analysis is the method of collecting and analyzing data in order to reconstruct the changes that linguistic features undergo in intertextual chains. The basis for comparing versions is text analysis. Version analyses trace linguistic products and elaborate on the changes in text features from version to version throughout intertextual chains. The quotes from the protesters in the Leba item, for example, have been serially processed by at least five stations of intertextual reporting and, at the same time, of economic value production (Part 1.3). Some prominent medialinguistic studies draw on version analyses to reveal how news changes throughout the intertextual chains (e.g., Van Dijk 1988; Bell 1991: 56 ff.; Luginbühl, Baumberger, Schwab & Burger 2002; Robinson 2009; Lams 2011). A frequent variant of version analysis compares text versions before and after revision processes. Newswriting analyses can contrast, for example, text versions at four production states: after drafting, after the journalist’s office sessions, after video editing, and after speaking the news in the booth (Perrin 2013: 232). A minimal, non-comparative variant of version analysis is the text analysis of a single version, with implicit or explicit reference to other versions that were not explicitly analyzed (e.g., Ekström 2001). This variant of version analysis is widespread in the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (Van Dijk 2001; see also critiques by Stubbs 1997 or Widdowson 2000). Comparing various versions of finished texts is sufficient to gain knowledge about how texts are adapted from version to version. However, version analysis fails to provide any information about whether the journalists were conscious of their actions when re-contextualizing or engaging in other practices of text production; whether the practices are typical of certain media with certain target audiences; or whether the issues associated with those practices are discussed and negotiated in the editorial offices. To generate such knowledge, additional methodological approaches are required (parts 3.2–3.4).
3.2Tracing writing processes with progression analysis
Analysts of verbal communication can treat language as an interface between situated activity and cognitive structures and processes. From this cognitive perspective (Part 2.2), a media linguistics interested in the particularities of newswriting will emphasize individuals’ language-related decisions inside and outside the newsrooms. What exactly do individual journalists do when they create customized items at the quick pace of media production? What are they trying to do, and why do they do it the way they do? This is what progression analysis captures.
Progression analysis is the multimethod approach of collecting and analyzing data in natural contexts in order to reconstruct text production processes as a cognitively controlled and socially anchored activity. It combines ethnographic observation, interviews, computer logging, and cue-based retrospective verbalizations to gather linguistic and contextual data. The approach was developed to investigate newswriting (e.g., Perrin 2003; Sleurs, Jacobs & Van Waes 2003; Van Hout & Jacobs 2008) and later transferred to other application fields of writing research, such as children’s writing processes (e.g., Gnach, Wiesner, Bertschi-Kaufmann & Perrin 2007) and translation (e.g., Ehrensberger-Dow & Perrin 2009). With progression analysis, data are obtained and related on three levels.
Before writing begins, progression analysis determines through interviews and observations what the writing situation is (e.g., Quandt 2008) and what experience writers draw on to guide their actions. Important factors include the writing task, professional socialization, and economic, institutional, and technological influences on the work situation. In the Idée suisse project, for example, data on the self-perception of the journalists investigated were obtained in semi-standardized interviews about their psychobiography, primarily in terms of their writing and professional experience, and their workplace. In addition, participatory and video observations were made about the various kinds of collaboration at the workplace.
During writing, progression analysis records every keystroke and writing movement in the emerging text with keylogging (e.g., Flinn 1987; Lindgren & Sullivan 2006; Spelman Miller 2006) and screenshot recording programs (e.g., Degenhardt 2006; Silva 2012) that run in the background of the text editing programs the journalists usually use, for instance behind the user interfaces of the news editing systems. The recording can follow the writing process over several workstations and does not influence the performance of the editing system or the journalist.
When the writing is done, progression analysis records what the writers say about their activities. Preferably immediately after completing the writing process, writers view on the screen how their texts came into being. While doing so, they continuously comment on what they did when writing and why they did it. An audio recording is made of these cue-based retrospective verbal protocols (RVP). This level of progression analysis opens a window onto the mind of the writer. The question is what can be recognized through this window: certainly not the all of the decisions and only the decisions that the author actually made, but rather the decisions that an author could have made in principle (e.g., Camps 2003; Ericsson & Simon 1993; Hansen 2006; Levy, Marek & Lea 1996; Smagorinsky 2001). The RVP is transcribed and then encoded as the author’s verbalization of aspects of his or her language awareness: writing strategies, and conscious writing practices (Part 2.5).
The data of these three stages complement each other to provide a multi-perspective, vivid picture of the object of study. In sum, progression analysis allows researchers to consider all the revisions to the text as well as all the electronic resources accessed during the production process; to trace the development of the emerging media item; and, finally, to reconstruct collaboration at media workplaces from different perspectives. The main focus of progression analysis, however, is the individuals’ cognitive and manifest processes of writing. Social structures such as public mandates, organizational routines, and editorial policies are reconstructed through the perspectives of the individual agents involved: the writers under investigation. If editorial offices or even media organizations are to be investigated with respect to how they produce their texts as a social activity, then progression analysis has to be supplemented by two other methods: variation analysis and metadiscourse analysis (parts 3.3 and 3.4).
3.3Revealing audience design with variation analysis
Analysts of verbal communication can treat language as an interface between situated activity and social structures and processes. From this social perspective (Part 2.2), a media linguistics interested in the particularities of newswriting will focus on how social groups such as editorial teams customize their linguistic products for their target audiences. Which linguistic means, for example which gradient of formality, does an editorial office choose for which addressees? This is what variation analysis captures.
Variation analysis is the method of collecting and analyzing text data to reconstruct the special features of the language of a certain discourse community. The basis for comparing versions is text and discourse analysis. Variation analyses investigate the type and frequency of typical features of certain language users’ productions in certain kinds of communication situations, such as newswriting for a specific audience. What variation analysis discerns is the differences between the language used in different situations by the same users (e.g., Koller 2004) or by various users in similar situations (e.g., Fang 1991; Werlen 2000).
In the Idée suisse project for example, variation analyses show systematic differences between the three news programs investigated. The relation of item length and cuts, for instance, document a higher pace of pictures in the French Téléjournal (4.5 sec. on average between visible cuts) than in the German Tagesschau (8.5 sec.) and 10 vor 10 (7 sec.). Similarly, variation analyses can reveal whether language properties of the newscast Tagesschau and the newsmagazine 10 vor 10, competing in the same German television program of the Swiss public broadcaster, differ according to their program profiles.
Such broadly-based variation analysis is able to show the special features of the language used in certain communities or media. However, what the method gains in width compared with a method such as progression analysis, it loses in depth. Why a community prefers to formulate its verbal contributions to media discourse in a certain way and not another cannot be captured by variation analysis. It would be possible to regain some of that depth by using a procedure that examines not only the text products, but also the institutionalized discourses connected with them – the comments of the community about its joint efforts.
3.4 Investigating language policy-ing with metadiscourse analysis
Analysts of verbal communication can treat language as an interface between situated activity and cognitive and social structures and processes. From this sociocognitive perspective (Part 2.2), a media linguistics interested in the particularities of newswriting will focus on editorial metadiscourse such as quality control discourse at editorial conferences or negotiations between journalists, anchors, and cutters. What do the various stakeholders think about their communicational offerings? How do they evaluate their activity in relation to policies – and how do they reconstruct and alter those policies?
Metadiscourse analysis is the method of collecting and analyzing data in order to reconstruct the socially- and individually-anchored (language) awareness in a discourse community. The basis for analyzing the metadiscourse of text production is conversation and discourse analysis.
Metadiscourse analyses investigate spoken and written communication about language and language use. This includes metaphors used when talking about writing (e.g., Gravengaard 2012; Levin & Wagner 2006), explicit planning or criticism of communication measures (e.g., Peterson 2001), the clarification of misunderstandings and conversational repair (e.g., Häusermann 2007), and follow-up communication by audiences (e.g., Klemm 2000). In all these cases, the participants’ utterances show how their own or others’ communicational efforts and offerings have been perceived, received, understood, and evaluated. The analysis demonstrates how rules of language use are explicitly negotiated and applied in a community.
In the Leba case for example, due to a computer crash, the journalist lacks the time to discuss his item with the cutter. In other case stories from the Idée suisse project, cutters challenge the journalists’ ethics and esthetics or appear as critical audience representatives. On a macro level of the project, interviews and document analyses reveal policy makers’ and media managers’ contradictory evaluation of and expectations towards the broadcasters’ – and the journalists’ – ability to promote public understanding (Part 1.2).
The focus of metadiscourse analysis, thus, scales up from negotiations about emerging texts at writers’ workplaces (e.g., Perrin 2011) to organizational quality control discourse and related discussions in society at large. Integrating metadiscourse analyses extends the reach of progression analysis from a single writer’s micro activity to societal macro structures.
4Conclusion: Mutual benefits
The above presented theoretical perspectives on verbal communication (Part 2, in particular 2.2) and methodological approaches (3) each capture overlapping facets of newswriting from their own angles, for example the source material, the work context, the thought patterns, the sequences of revisions in the writing process, the text products, the news programs, the editorial mission statement and policy, and the internal and external evaluation and development of norms. Each approach has its own focus, complementing the strengths of the other approaches (Figure 6).
The next table (Figure 7) illustrates the interplay of the four methods by using the leitmotif example from the Leba case where the journalist changes “voie express” to “voie tranquille” (Part 1.4).
–A micro version analysis comparing the first and the last version of the corresponding sentence shows the difference: one word has changed. The researcher interprets this revision as a reframing of the boat’s speed and, in a wider context, of the activities the media item reports.
–However, only progression analysis provides evidence that the journalist consciously changed the word to use it as a leitmotif. Moreover, progression analysis indicates that this idea emerged when the experienced journalist was surprised by details from the source materials he carefully read and watched.
–A variation analysis contrasting processes and products by experienced and less experienced journalists then can reveal experience to be a strong predictor for success in handling critical situations and for results with a high potential to promote public understanding.
–A metadiscourse analysis, finally, can show whether the journalist’s emergent solution is approved in the following editorial conference, and whether it corresponds, on a macro level, to the expectations of both media managers and policy makers. Such successful emergent solutions deserve to be disseminated through knowledge transformation measures.
The discussion has shown that newswriting, as an example of verbal discourse in the media is accessible from complementary perspectives and that each perspective calls for suitable methods. Questions about cognitive practices, for instance, can only be addressed using insights into cognitive relationships; the same is true for social practices and their interactions. Investigating stretches of language in a “one-size fits all approach” (Richardson 2007: 76) is not enough – it cannot explain what is special about journalistic news production (e.g., Philo 2007) and fails to reveal structures that “cannot be directly observed” (Ó Riain 2009, 294). The analysis of verbal communication in media discourse definitely benefits from interdisciplinary endeavors (Part 1.1) – and so do the disciplines involved.
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