Interdisciplinary studies within linguistics are "the sign of the times". Nowadays, linguistics is applied to domains of knowledge which before did not seem to have any relationship with the study of languages. For instance, linguistics now analyses such diverse áreas as computer science, medicine, psychology, sociology, etc. Within this scenario, this special volume of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (RAEI) exhibits a panorama of different linguistic approaches to a wide range of media discourses. Media is an essential feature of today's globalized world, a networked world in which ubiquitous media such as televisión, the Internet and mobile technologies share their space with more traditional means of communication such as the printed newspapers or the radio. Media, forus, is a broadterm which encompasses many forms of communication. Indeed, media is not only the typical uni-directional one-to-many form of communication, but also any way in which people can connect to other people in this interconnected world we live in, including one-to-one communication (mobile phones, e-mail, chat rooms) and the current interest in producing many-to-many user-generated discourses, produced by a collectivity in order to be shared by the collectivity (for instance weblogs, virtual social spaces such as MySpace, YouTube,Wikipedia, etc.). This broad idea of media can be traced in the different articles that are included in this special issue of RAEI. From the contents of this volume, we can conclude that newspapers are still one the main interests in linguistic research on the media. This interest is reflected upon the eight articles that are devoted to this médium. Some of them deal with political discourse and analyse the: way politicians and newspapers use language to achieve their goals. In this guise, we can mention the contributions by Pilar Alonso (on comment articles in the press), Una Dirks (bn the Iraq conflict discourse in the British and Germán quality press), Juana Marín Arrese and Begoña Núñez Perucha (on evaluating journalistic
