Argumentation in the Newsroom

Abstract

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.

Fragmentary narrative reasoning. On the enthymematic structure of journalistic storytelling

“…OM_attaccoisraeliano_verbal_1.docx; cst_cdt_130131_0000_OM_ attaccoisraelia-no_item_1.pdf; cst_cdt_130131_0000_OM_ raid_item_1.pdf. This case has been analyzed also in Zampa (2015Zampa ( , 2017 and Zampa and Musi (2016). 6 cst_cdt_130123_0000_MB_cameron_ver-bal_1.docx; cst_cdt_130124_0000_MB_cam-eron_item.pdf; cst_cdt_130124_0000_ref-erendum_item_1.pdf.…”

“…6 cst_cdt_130123_0000_MB_cameron_ver-bal_1.docx; cst_cdt_130124_0000_MB_cam-eron_item.pdf; cst_cdt_130124_0000_ref-erendum_item_1.pdf. The CAME case has been analyzed in greater detail in Burger and Delaloye (2016), Zampa (2015Zampa ( , 2017 and Zampa and Perrin (2016). The report, though, was not taken into consideration in these publications.…”

“…Besides a long tradition in reconstructing the formal structure of argumentation (starting in ancient times with Aristotle and reviving again from the 1950s on), nowadays, studies on the actual functioning of argumentation in its contexts of use are flourishing. Journalism is one of these, with work being done especially on argumentation in the newsmaking process (Burger & Delaloye, 2016;Luciani, Rocci & Zampa, 2015;Zampa, 2015Zampa, , 2017Zampa & Bletsas, 2018;Zampa & Musi, 2016;Zampa & Perrin, 2016). For what concerns the news product, the editorial has been at the center of scholarly attention (Gauthier, 2002;López Pan, 2015;Zampa, 2015Zampa, , 2017.…”

“…To prove this claim, we analyze fragmentary narration in two editorials and in the corresponding reports. Building upon previous studies that consider journalistic texts enthymematic (López Pan, 2015;Zampa, 2015Zampa, , 2017, we reconsider studies on journalistic writing as storytelling from an argumentation theory perspective. 2 This approach shows how the two rhetorical modes of narration and argumentation -together with description and exposition -are intertwined in everyday journalistic writing, opening up to a research line that will broaden the still limited scope of studies in argumentation dealing with narration, and deepen the widespread and often superficial understanding of journalism as storytelling.…”

Recycling a genre for news automation

“…In brief, the more news value criteria an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it will become news. Despite the fact that the criteria and their mutual dynamics are a subject of constant practical and scholarly debate (for an overview, see O'Neill & Harcup, 2009;Zampa, 2017, Chapter 4), we view these dozens of criteria as effectively creating four distinct larger categories, topicality, unexpectedness, societal importance, and personal interest. A significant factor in newsworthiness seems to be the outlierness of the events when contrasted with the set of normal, day-to-day events (for relevant literature on automatic outlier and novelty detection, see, e.g., Chandola, Banerjee, & Kumar, 2009;Gupta et al, 2014).…”