News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism
Cambridge University Press, 2/11/2010
EAN 9780521525657, ISBN10: 0521525659
Paperback, 296 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Written by a former news reporter and editor, News Talk gives us an insider's view of the media, showing how journalists select and construct their news stories. Colleen Cotter goes behind the scenes, revealing how language is chosen and shaped by news staff into the stories we read and hear. Tracing news stories from start to finish, she shows how the actions of journalists and editors - and the limitations of news writing formulas - may distort a story that was prepared with the most determined effort to be fair and accurate. Using insights from both linguistics and journalism, News Talk is a remarkable picture of a hidden world and its working practices on both sides of the Atlantic. It will interest those involved in language study, media and communication studies and those who want to understand how media shape our language and our view of the world.
Introduction
Part I. The Process and Practice of Everyday Journalism
1. An interactional and ethnographic approach to news media language
2. Craft and community
reading the ways of journalists
3. The ways reporters learn to report and editors learn to edit
Part II. Conceptualizing the News
4. News values and their significance in text and practice
5. The 'story meeting'
deciding what's fit to print
6. The interaction-based nature of journalism
Part III. Constructing the Story
Texts and Contexts
7. Story design and the dictates of the 'lead'
8. 'Boilerplate'
simplifying stories, anchoring text, altering meaning
9. Style and standardization in news language
Part IV. Decoding the Discourse
10. The impact of the news process on media discourse
Conclusion and key points
Appendix 1. Story samples
Appendix 2. Outline guide for the analysis of news media language
Appendix 3. SPJ ethics code
Glossary of news and linguistic terms
References.