Writingbusinessnews

WRITING BUSINESS NEWS

Writing business news: how journalists ply their trade INTRODUCTION

News writing in a flat world In their content analysis of UK print journalism, Lewis et al. (2008) provide evidence for the journalistic reliance on public relations (PR) and press agency (PA) copy. The authors attribute this source reliance to an increased workload, staff cuts and dwindling sales, a claim they back up with interview data, employment figures, profit margins and pagination patterns at UK national newspapers. However, missing in their political economy of PR & PA copy uptake by journalists, is an account of how journalists actually knock PR copy "into shape". It is within this remit that my linguistic ethnography of desktop newswriting should be situated.

THEORETICAL ALIGNMENT

Towards a social science of language-in-society My thesis aligns with five research traditions: • (Critical) Discourse Analysis (Richardson, Cotter) • Media anthropology (Peterson, Berkowitz) • News sociology (Cottle, Deuze) • Linguistic Ethnography (Rampton, Bucholtz) • Writing process analysis (Perrin, Van Waes)

and

feeds into public and academic discourses about: • the quality of (business) news • the agency of news practitioners • the process of news production • newsroom (re)organization • a mediascape in flux

DATA COLLECTION, SELECTION & ANALYSIS Data collection

Data selection

Data analysis

Fieldwork (6 months, 2006-07) in a Dutch-language newsroom in Brussels resulted in a corpus of:

Construction of a ‘core dataset’ to which I hold myself accountable:

A combination of methods: •

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digital data (pictures, audio, video & keystroke logging) and analog data (official documents, fieldnotes & print-outs)

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22 logged writing processes 20 retrospective interviews 53 story meetings 100+ source texts, memos, emails, briefs

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quantitative cluster analyses writing process analysis ‘telling’ rather than ‘typical’ ethnographic case studies discourse analytical concepts

A LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY of BUSINESS NEWS PRODUCTION Chapter 1. Introduction

2. Writing news

Breakdown

Data

Research question

Outline of relevant research traditions, overall rationale 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

Description Data coding Cluster analysis Results

Status in preparation

22 Inputlog files

How do journalists write from sources?

in preparation

An ethnography of news production must account for (Peterson 2003: 162): 3. Newsroom technology

"producers' engagements with the technologies of production"

Gazprom

How does a digital editorial platform affect the journalist’s framing practices?

in press

4. Newsroom practices

"the myriad practices [at stake] ... statuses, identities, pleasures, and knowledges, as well as money "

53 story meetings

How do displays of evidence, story placement negotiations, use of reporter voice,… accomplish interactional tasks such as displaying professional competence, expertise, status and so on?

in preparation

"the interpretive practices that producers bring to their task"

Apple TV

How do reporters make sense of the various sources, narratives and frames around them and channel these into one final news story?

in preparation

"the roles played by consumption in producers' entextualization practices"

stock market news

How do financial journalists source forward-looking financial reports such as buy-sell advice?

in preparation

5. Interpretive creativity

6. Entextualization practices

7. Conclusion

Implications and further research

NewsTalk&Text Ghent University Research Group on News Production Processes www.ntt.ugent.be

in preparation

Supervision by Prof. Geert Jacobs Research by Tom Van Hout Dept. of Language & Communication | Faculty of Arts Ghent University | [email protected]