29.2390, Calls: Applied Ling, Disc Analysis, Pragmatics, Text/Corpus Ling/Belgium

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-2390. Mon Jun 04 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.2390, Calls: Applied Ling, Disc Analysis, Pragmatics, Text/Corpus Ling/Belgium

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Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:26:14
From: Martina Temmerman [martina.temmerman at vub.be]
Subject: What’s (the) News? Values, Viruses and Vectors of Newsworthiness

 
Full Title: What’s (the) News? Values, Viruses and Vectors of Newsworthiness 
Short Title: WhatNews 

Date: 13-Dec-2018 - 14-Dec-2018
Location: Brussels, Belgium 
Contact Person: Martina Temmerman
Meeting Email: martina.temmerman at vub.be
Web Site: http://www.vub.ac.be/en/events/2018/whatnews 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 30-Jun-2018 

Meeting Description:

We invite participants to engage in a critical discussion of newsworthiness.
Possible questions which can be addressed are: are there topics which are
newsworthy by nature, which elements arouse most interest in human psyche,
which stories and/or sources do journalists and their audience find worth
sharing, how is news created linguistically, how do news values vary between
media types and news beats, how can journalists or news workers construct
issues or events as interesting, what is the relation between newsworthiness
and publishing platforms.

The venue for the conference will be the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural
Sciences (https://www.naturalsciences.be/en) Vautierstraat/Rue Vautier 29,
1000 Brussels, near the Brussels-Luxembourg station, a lively neighbourhood
with lots of hotels and restaurants.

Conference fee (including pre-conference reception, lunch, coffee):

€ 150 (regular participants), € 75 (PhD students).

Dinner will be organized on Friday 14 December and charged separately.


Steered by what Kovach & Rosenstiel describe as our 'awareness instinct',
exchanging 'news' fulfills basic human needs for information, orientation, and
connection. The entanglement of 'news', understood as recent and current
public information, and the development of journalism (as a profession),
renders the question what 'is' or 'becomes' news highly relevant for the study
of journalism. One particularly influential approach to 'newsworthiness' in
journalism studies emerged from Galtung and Ruge's 1965 seminal study on 'news
values' in (foreign) news reporting. The core question of this study was which
 criteria journalists apply in the news selection process. The authors contend
that (negative) events having to do with conflict, elites or change in the
daily lives or the immediate environment of the audience are likely to become
news. Especially if they have some magnitude and if they are recent,
unexpected and/or if they can be linked to individual people. Since then,
numerous scholars taking sociological or critical cultural approaches to 'news
values', and selection and journalistic routines in general, have revisited
their ideas, and refined and complemented them.

These insights have been applicable to a lesser or greater extent throughout
the whole history of journalism, yet, the digital era and the advent of social
media more specifically have altered vectors - understood both as agents and
carriers - of newsworthiness significantly, reshaping how 'news' is conceived,
the way it comes about and is exchanged. Within a networked, globalized
environment, the range of sources that are available to journalists or that
are able to trigger 'news' on a day-to-day basis has expanded considerably,
while a plethora of newcomers (e.g. citizen journalists, alternative,
grassroots and partisan media outlets) in or at the margins of the
journalistic field challenge traditional conceptions of 'newsworthiness', as
well as the relationship between 'journalism' and 'news' per se (e.g. in 'slow
journalism' and 'constructive journalism' movements). Even if the position of
these newcomers along traditional news media's status as primary definers of
'the news' may still be subject to debate, it is hard to deny the impact of
digitization and social media on contemporary audiences' daily 'news diet'.

Amongst others, search engines, (automated) news aggregators, and social media
platforms, and their underlying algorithms, have become key to understanding
how news emerges and circulates nowadays. Social media allow to register which
stories are clicked, liked or shared most and thus to examine which topics and
approaches raise the highest interest of the audience. Journalists are
expected to develop a feeling for 'shareability' and to produce texts and
visuals which will 'go viral'. The focus in the selection process seems to
have shifted ever more from what journalists deemed fit to publish towards
what the audience is expected to appreciate most. Moreover, as clicks, likes
and shares are monitored automatically, news stories which receive the most
attention of readers are moved up higher in the news flow, so that they are
picked up even more often. This presentation process often happens without
human intervention, thus leaving the selection entirely to the appreciation of
the audience. Furthermore, these developments have also led to highly
customized news packages - 'me media' - and the related issues of the 'filter
bubble' and 'echo chamber'.

However, it is still the journalist (or is it the 'news worker') who decides
what shape the story will take and which aspects will be accentuated. The
topic of news values can therefore also be approached from a
linguistic/discursive side. The main question then is how news workers
construct an event as interesting or relevant, i.e. how they use language to
make certain events newsworthy, especially on the internet media platforms.
And taking into consideration the importance of visual resources on these
platforms, an analysis of verbal text will in many cases have to be replaced
by or complemented with a multimodal analysis.

We invite participants to engage in a critical discussion of newsworthiness.
Possible questions which can be addressed are: are there topics which are
newsworthy by nature, which elements arouse most interest in human psyche,
which stories and/or sources do journalists and their audience find worth
sharing, how do news values vary between media types and news beats, how can
journalists or news workers construct issues or events as interesting, what is
the relation between newsworthiness and publishing platforms.

Inspirational literature:

Bednarek, Monika & Helen Caple (2017). The Discourse of News Values: How News
Organizations Create 'Newsworthiness'. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harcup, Tony & Deirdre O'Neill (2017). What is news? News values revisited
(again). Journalism Studies, 18 (12). pp. 1470-1488.

2nd Call for Papers:

We welcome submissions from all relevant disciplinary backgrounds approaching
topics including but certainly not limited to: 

- News values in the selection of news
- News values in the production of news
- The linguistic or multimodal construction of an event as newsworthy
- The relation between publishing platforms and newsworthiness
- What makes news 'go viral'
- Algorithms and automation in the presentation of news
- Methodological approaches to the study of newsworthiness
- We welcome both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and analyses at
process, product/text, and/or audience level.

Junior researchers are warmly invited to participate.

Please send a proposal of no more than 300 words (excluding selected
references) together with your affiliation and a short biography (c. 100
words) to whatnews at vub.be by 30 June 2018. Decisions will be announced by 15
August. Questions about any aspect of the conference should be addressed to
whatnews at vub.be




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