Modelling Quoting in Newswriting: A Framework for Studies on the Production of News

Abstract

A framework for studies on the production of newsThe 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.

Problematising the restoration of trust through transparency: Focusing on quoting

“…However, recent production-oriented research on journalistic quoting in a written format (e.g. Havumetsä, 2020;Kuo, 2007;Matsushita, 2016, in press;Nylund, 2006;Satoh, 2001), to which my series of studies (Haapanen, 2011(Haapanen, , 2016(Haapanen, , 2017a(Haapanen, , 2017b(Haapanen, , 2017c(Haapanen, , 2018(Haapanen, , 2020Haapanen and Perrin, 2019) makes a not inconsiderable contribution, has revealed that the relationship between original interview discourse 2 and the published quoted discourse is by no means so simple and simplistic. To begin with, there is no absolute correspondence between sound waves in the air and graphemes on paper or on screen, and several features of oral communication, such as prosody, do not have any apparent equivalence in writing -if any at all.…”

“…The material was originally in Finnish but has been translated into English by the author. (For details about the data used in the first two subsections, see Haapanen, 2017a, and in the third subsection, see Haapanen, 2020. Some parts of the analyses have been reproduced from these publications without explicit cross-references.…”

“…As already mentioned, I have identified the key phases in the process of newswritingfrom the selection of a topic through to the surface realisation of a news item -as four sub-processes of quoting (Haapanen, 2020). This means that journalists (1) decide on a topical issue to be addressed,…”

Quoting to persuade

“…An opinion text generally presents subjective argumentative text that focuses on events and issues more broadly than a news story on a specific topic (Feez, Iedema, & White, 2008). Sometimes, however, news stories also include bias or subjectivity (Bednarek & Caple, 2012), for example, when intertwining facts and opinions in selecting and rejecting quotation sources and source material (Haapanen, 2019). Opinion piece writers selected for the current study are either specialist writers (Feez et al, 2008) or people with expertise of the topic who generally support opinion with factual information (Columbia University, 2010).…”