https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1973-4843
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ABSTRACT
The Mediated Social Communication (MSC) approach considers mass media a venue for opposing and complementary societal groups to publicly negotiate socially relevant topics. This negotiation is conducted through representatives of these groups and mediated by journalists. Inspired by the MSC approach, this paper presents an empirically grounded model that structures the mediating process through the process of quoting. By identifying the key phases of newswriting as sub-processes of quoting, the paper argues that journalists (1) decide on a topical issue to be addressed (topicalisation), (2) identify groups of people who are linked to this issue (societal localisation), (3) pick some people as representatives of these societal groups (personalisation), and (4) verbalise these people's points of view, often by means of quoting, inter alia (verbalisation). The four-phase model is then operationalised into a data collection method that facilitates access to and fosters new insights into the subtle dynamics of newswriting. Hitherto, these dynamics have often remained obscure, because the craft ethos is adopted as tacit knowledge through implicit socialisation and is therefore difficult for journalists to verbalise. The paper concludes by calling for reconsideration of journalists’ role as gatekeepers who decide which issues and voices are heard in public discourse.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Lauri Haapanen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1973-4843
Notes
1. The research on news values is abundant. For an overview, see O’Neill and Harcup (Citation2009), and Zampa (Citation2017, Chapter 4).
2. Following a line of research adopted among media linguists (Catenaccio et al. Citation2011), the term newswriting also encompasses various practices preceding actual writing and editing, such as negotiating the subject matter, searching for background information, as well as planning and carrying out interviews (e.g., Perrin Citation2013). Further, the initial part of the compound, news, is not restricted to news articles but also includes profiles, fact-based articles, and other typical kinds of journalistic output. Such a broad approach not only increases the applicability of my findings and their explanatory power in the multifaceted field of journalism, but also diminishes the hegemony of news-focused research (for discussion, see Haapanen Citation2017b, 13–14). The approach is also practical, as the boundaries between different genres of journalistic articles are blurred and rarely defined (for an exhaustive categorisation of news articles, see Vandendaele, De Cuypere, and Van Praet Citation2015).
3. The MSC approach, still relatively unrecognised outside the German-speaking academic world, was developed by German scholars like Otto Groth, Bernd Maria Aswerus, and Hans Wagner during the twentieth century, and is based on even earlier contributions; for example, by Albert Schäffle (see Fürst, Schönhagen, and Bosshart Citation2015; Schönhagen and Fürst Citation2019). As regards this article, I am especially grateful to Professor Philomen Schönhagen for sharing her expertise on the MSC approach in personal communication and in comments on the different stages of the manuscript.
4. Wagner (Citation1978, 73–78) distinguishes three types of communicative representation. Legitimised representation is realised e.g., by the statements of a spokesperson of a party, company or association. Claimed representation refers to representatives without formal legitimation but who claim to speak for a group, while statistical representation refers to actors without formal legitimation and specific status but who are making statements that others approve.
5. In this article, small capitals stand for the key aspects of the communication and mediation processes of mass media as conceptualised in the MSC literature. Italics stand for the role that the particular representative of a certain societal group has in the negotiation of the topic in question.
6. I am grateful to Daniel Perrin, the project leader of the research project “Idée Suisse: Language policy, norms, and practice as exemplified by Swiss Radio and Television”, for his kind permission to use data from corpus and case studies based on earlier analyses of these data. The Idée Suisse project was funded from 2005 to 2007 by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It is worth noting that this corpus dates from over ten years ago, and during these years the mediascape has been undergoing continuous change. Nevertheless, I consider the corpus to be entirely valid for modelling the fundamental procedure of newswriting.
7. For a standard model of roles in media items (decision-makers, experts, people concerned, etc.), see Perrin (Citation2015).
8. In the cue-based retrospective verbal protocol, the screenshot recording of the writing process is shown to the journalist right after the writing is completed and s/he is asked to continuously comment on what his or her intentions and writing strategies were while writing (Perrin Citation2003).
9. It is worth pointing out that we are discussing the Western mediascape, where there is considerable freedom of expression. For example in China, all newspapers are subject to government censorship and consequently the possibilities for journalistic decision-making are very restricted (e.g., Huan Citation2018).