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

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-911. Mon Feb 26 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.911, Calls: Applied Ling, Disc Analysis, Pragmatics, Text/Corpus Ling/Belgium

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Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2018 17:14:00
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.


Call for Papers:

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. (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. 

The digital era and the advent of social media more specifically have altered
vectors – understood both as agents and carriers – of newsworthiness
significantly. 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. 

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. 

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.

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.

All papers will be published (after the authors’ consent) in the electronic
proceedings of the conference and we are planning to publish a selection of
the papers in a volume and/or a special issue.

Junior researchers are warmly invited to participate.

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.

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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