The news we see daily is selected from among alternatives by journalists. Argumentation in the Newsroom uses ethnographic data from Swiss television and print newsrooms to shed light on how journalists make decisions regarding the selection and presentation of news items in their daily professional practice. The evidence illustrates that, contrary to the standard view, journalistic decisions are not limited to the influence of standardized production patterns, instinct, or editors’ orders. Rather, in their attempt to produce the best news possible, journalists carefully ponder and discuss their choices, utilizing full-fledged critical discussions at all stages of the newsmaking process. By employing the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion in conjunction with the Argumentum Model of Topics, this study provides a detailed reconstruction of how journalists make use of argumentative reasoning, basing their decisions on a complex set of material premises and on recurrent procedural premises.

The information, events and voices that receive media attention are highly dependent on their linguistic form – when the language is accessible to journalists, the news is more likely to enter public discourse. If the voices are in languages other than that of the region the journalist is writing for, then translation strategies can influence not only the news style but also the selection and perspectivation of the information presented. In this article, we discuss how working between languages inside the newsroom can endanger the flow of accurate information. Among other stakeholders, we focus on journalists as key gatekeepers in global and local newsflows who need to cope with cross-linguistic communication in their processes of news production. Initial analyses show that translation matters in the newsroom, but it is far from being part of systematic professional socialization or subject to quality measures.

The present paper deals with the production of a multimodal news item from an ethnographic perspective, aiming at fully understanding the role played by news values, i.e. shared criteria for news selection, in newsroom argumentation. The news item we consider is the picture news from Corriere del Ticino, the main Italian-language newspaper in Switzerland. As the Italian name fototesto says, this news item combines a verbal and a photographical component, presenting the journalists with particular challenges in its selection. To shed light on this production process, we take as a case study a picture news on eco-friendly heat distribution and the editorial conference leading to its choice, which took place on January 24, 2013. We analyze the interaction from the viewpoint of argumentation theory, combining Pragma-Dialectics (van Eemeren and Grootendorst) and the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2009, 2010, under review), and unravel the reasons behind choices in content and form taken collaboratively by the journalists.

Argumentation is generally conceived of as a dialogic activity between two or more participants. Nonetheless, it operates also at an intrapersonal level (Rocci 2005), in a soliloquy where protagonist and antagonist of the critical discussion are embodied in the same person. We argue this case by analyzing journalists’ argumentation about linguistic choices in newswriting processes. Empirically, we draw on data generated with progression analysis (Perrin 2003), in particular with cue-based retrospective verbal protocols. The data was produced by the journalists under investigation when they, while watching video recordings of their text production processes, reconstructed and verbalized their decisions (Perrin 2011: 60). In the detail analysis, we focus on one editorial by an experienced journalist ofCorriere del Ticino,the main Italian-language newspaper in Switzerland.

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