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

Abstract

This article uses a 36-million word corpus of news reporting on Hurricane Katrina in the United States to explore how computer-based methods can help researchers to investigate the construction of newsworthiness. It makes use of Bednarek and Caple's discursive approach to the analysis of news values, and is both exploratory and evaluative in nature. One aim is to test and evaluate the integration of corpus techniques in applying discursive news values analysis (DNVA). We employ and evaluate corpus techniques that have not been tested previously in relation to the large-scale analysis of news values. These techniques include tagged lemma frequencies, collocation, key part-of-speech tags (POStags) and key semantic tags. A secondary aim is to gain insights into how a specific happening-Hurricane Katrina-was linguistically constructed as newsworthy in major American news media outlets, thus also making a contribution to ecolinguistics.

Mainstream Media in Contemporary Fluid News Environments: Brandcasting the News in the TV Genre of News Tickers

“…In particular, in the context of the news industry, editors usually and routinely rely on a series of factors when deciding which and how specific events can be included in the news. These factors are generally referred to as news values (Bell, 1991;Bednarek & Caple, 2012a, 2012bPotts et al, 2015). By highlighting the way specific media genres regularly enhance given values, a first insight can be gained into the professional practice of news reporting in specific situations.…”

“…This part of our investigation has been carried out by using corpus linguistic methodologies and, in particular, by following the methodology used by Caple (2014, 2017) and Potts et al (2015). While the purposes of their investigations are not specifically linked to our type of analysis, we can nonetheless use their approach to the analysis of news values in order to see if, from a newsworthiness point of view, the observations introduced in Sections "Marketising the news" and "Branding and legitimising the news" on the phenomena of brandisation and marketisation are confirmed or contradicted.…”

“…Bednarek and Caple's (2014) discursive approach to news values (more specifically, their Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA); Bednarek & Caple, 2017) investigates "how newsworthiness is construed and established through discourse" (Bednarek & Caple, 2012b, p. 104). According to the authors (Bednarek, 2016a(Bednarek, , 2016bBednarek & Caple, 2012bCaple & Bednarek, 2015), a discursive perspective views news values as a "quality of texts" (Caple & Bednarek, 2015, p. 13, emphasis in the original), and their analysis can allow us to "systematically investigate how these values are constructed in the different types of textual material involved in the news process" (Bednarek & Caple, 2012b, p. 104). 4 This approach to news values allows Bednarek and Caple (2012b to highlight given textual traces, referred to as "pointers" to newsworthiness (Bednarek & Caple, 2014, p. 11), 5 that can let us glimpse at how they are realised in news discourse.…”

“…As this methodology is mainly qualitative in nature, it seems peculiar to use corpus linguistic techniques to analyse how news values are constructed. However, when approaching large amounts of data, Caple (2014, 2017) and Potts et al (2015) argue that corpus linguistic techniques (such as the analysis of frequencies (word forms, lemmas, clusters), the analysis of keywords or grammatical/semantic tags, dispersion analysis, etc.) can help with news values analysis, especially in those cases where a non-topic-specific corpus is under investigation.…”

Narrative voice in popular science in the British press: a corpus analysis on the construal of attributed meanings

“…Not every piece of information can make it to the news. News is driven by news values (Bednarek 2006a;Bednarek 2016;Bell 1991;Potts et al 2015), by at least one or a series of features which combined make the subject valuable enough to be considered of interest for the public domain:…”