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Abstract
This article engages with recent debates on “tabloidization,” applying a corpus linguistic approach to examine diachronic shifts in the language and values of quoted speech in tabloid and “quality” newspapers. While “tabloidization” is often portrayed as a spreading of tabloid news values to “quality” publications, empirical data depict a process of dual-convergence whereby the quoted speech of each publication type adopts the language and values initially characteristic of the other. The significance of “tabloidization”—which has been identified as a key and emblematic component of recent debates on the changing nature of mass media—draws largely from the public-interest role of newspapers whereby the press have been viewed as agents with the power to inform and represent members of the shifting public sphere(s).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Susanne Wagner, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and Robert Picard for their insights and support.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 As the term “broadsheet” is now obsolete and this paper addresses attempts made by tabloid and “upmarket” newspapers to court a broader range of readers, the term “quality” has been selected to refer to newspapers that have traditionally been perceived to emphasize “information-orientation,” which gives priority to facts and information that serve the public interest over subject matter, event topics, and/or language that serve to interest the public.
2 Drawing from Volosinov’s (Citation1972) framework, Fairclough (Citation1995) identifies direct discourse, essentially consisting of direct quotes, and indirect discourse, wherein the content of direct discourse is summarized or paraphrased.
3 Personalization can be understood as journalistic focus on an individual or entity representative of a larger theme or topic, whereby emphasis on the personal and/or emotional often supersedes the emphasis on fact or public affairs-oriented journalism.
4 Sensationalism can be understood as journalistic deployment of content and language that stands to provoke sensory and emotional reactions from readers as the result of an emphasis placed on drama, magnitude, salaciousness, and/or the unexpected.
5 A corpus is a collection of texts that can be considered representative of a certain variety or use of language.
6 The sets of 12 articles were identified as follows. Separate searches were run in UKPressOnline, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Archive: The Guardian (1821–2003) and The Observer (1791–2003), The Times Digital Archive (1785–1985), and NexisUK for the words “war” and “scandal.” The total number of hits from each search was divided by 12, with the resulting figure taken forward as “every nth article” considered for analysis. Articles identified were assessed against criteria deemed necessary to fulfill the study’s objectives: the article had to be over 200 words in length, featured in a news section or on page one, and cover a topic where the word “war” or “scandal” was used in the literal sense. For example, a story from the Mirror published on December 21, 2000 with the headline, “The War of Words: PQ [Parti-Quebecois] Must Protect Its Integrity, Premier Says” was passed over. In cases such as this one, the closest result meeting all criteria was extracted.
7 The CLAWS 7 tagset is a Web-based tool purposed for corpus annotation, or the tagging of the parts of speech (POS) of a body of text. CLAWS 7 was used in view of its capacity to code the most extensive POS range.
8 Corpus analysis software.
9 Reading levels for FKR scores: 100–90: understood by 10–11-year-olds; 70–60: understood by 14–16-year-olds; 30–0: understood by college graduates.
10 Subordinating conjunctions were subjected to the same forms of quantitative methods applied in and excluded from this paper in view of the inconsistent nature of the data collected.
11 While Biber’s study of noun-phrase structures in newspapers identifies an increase in noun-noun phrases between the years 1950 and 1990 (2003), the study does not extend beyond this timeframe, nor does it examine tabloid titles. Noun-noun phrases thus merit treatment that cannot be afforded within the parameters of this particular study.
12 This is to say that the data derived from this year quite conspicuously contrasts with the trends and/or proportion of change generally seen for a given dataset.
