Never Read the Comments: Planning System Reform Discourse from the Bottom of the Web

ABSTRACT

In planning literature little attention has been paid to the relationships between news articles and readers’ comments. Based on a newspaper article that announced a planning system reform agenda in Sydney, Australia, this paper is curious about comments made by self-selecting commenters. To this end, the paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the actors, actions and the framing in a newspaper article, as well as the extent the readers’ comments engage with the news article and other commenters. The paper shows that the readers employed a diverse range of discursive strategies to make sense of the news article.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning reform
• reader generated contents
• critical discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).