Personalisation in Mass Media Communication: British Online News between Public and Private

309 Pages·2014·2.169 MB·English

by  Daniela Landert

Personalisation in Mass Media Communication
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)
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Editor Associate Editor
Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker
University of Augsburg University of Zurich
Founding Editors
Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin
University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University
Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara
University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of
Miriam A. Locher Foreign Studies
John C. Heritage
University of California at Los Universität Basel Sandra A. Thompson
Angeles Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of California at
University of Athens Santa Barbara
Susan C. Herring
Indiana University Srikant Sarangi Teun A. van Dijk
Cardiff University Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Masako K. Hiraga
Barcelona
St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Marina Sbisà
University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu
The University of Queensland
Volume 240
Personalisation in Mass Media Communication. British online news between
public and private
by Daniela Landert
Personalisation in Mass Media
Communication
British online news between public and private
Daniela Landert
University of Zurich
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 240
isbn 978 90 272 5645 4 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7083 2 (Eb)
© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.
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Table of contents
List of tables ix
List of figures xi
Acknowledgements xiii
chapter 1
Introduction 1
chapter 2
Personalisation in mass media 9
2.1 Mass media communication between impersonality
and personalisation 11
2.2 Personalisation and linguistic immediacy 18
2.3 Public, private, involving, and immediate 23
2.4 Modelling personalisation 31
chapter 3
Data collection 37
3.1 Working with online data 37
3.2 Characteristics of the online news sites 40
3.3 Overview of collected data sets 42
3.3.1 The online data 42
3.3.2 The Times from 1985 48
3.4 Technical aspects 49
3.4.1 Zotero snapshots 50
3.4.2 Screenshots 51
3.4.3 Inconsistencies between formats 51
3.4.4 XML format 52
3.5 A comment on statistics 55
vi Personalisation in Mass Media Communication
chapter 4
Feedback and interaction 59
4.1 Audience interaction in mass media communication 61
4.1.1 Modelling audience interaction 61
4.1.2 Interaction on online news sites – a brief history 65
4.2 Forms of feedback and interaction 67
4.2.1 Indirect feedback 67
4.2.2 User comments 69
4.2.3 Opinion polls 75
4.2.4 Contact details and profiles 77
4.2.5 Audience content 79
4.3 Strategies for integrating user-generated content 83
4.3.1 Separation: The Times Online and the Guardian 85
4.3.2 Integration: BBC News 87
4.3.3 Blurring: The Mail Online and the Sun 89
4.4 Summary and conclusion 91
chapter 5
Visual elements 93
5.1 Overview of visual elements in news articles 94
5.2 Images and personalisation 97
5.2.1 Functional relations between visual and textual elements 99
5.2.2 The content of visual elements 105
5.2.3 Interactive functions of images: How the content is depicted 108
5.3 Case study: Visual elements in reports on the Edlington hearing 114
5.4 Summary and conclusion 124
chapter 6
News actors 125
6.1 Official, private, and celebrity actors 126
6.2 Main topics and actors in top-listed news articles 131
6.2.1 Topic categories in news articles 132
6.2.2 Actor constellations in different topic categories 134
6.2.3 Topic categories across news sites 136
6.3 Representing the actors 139
6.4 Case study revisited: Personalising content in reports
on the Edlington hearing 144
6.5 Summary and conclusion 158
Table of contents vii
chapter 7
Direct speech 161
7.1 Forms of speech representation 163
7.1.1 Leech and Short’s classification 164
7.1.2 Faithfulness claims 166
7.1.3 Modifications to Leech and Short’s classification 170
7.2 Functions of direct speech 174
7.3 Frequency of direct speech 180
7.3.1 Quantifying direct speech 180
7.3.2 Direct speech across subcorpora 183
7.4 Source types 186
7.4.1 Categorisation of source types 187
7.4.2 Named, identified and anonymous sources 192
7.4.3 Private and official sources 194
7.5 Summary and conclusion 197
chapter 8
Personal pronouns 199
8.1 Reference of first and second person pronouns 200
8.2 First and second person pronouns as features
of immediacy and involvement 207
8.3 Frequency of first and second person pronouns 210
8.3.1 Identification of first and second person pronouns 210
8.3.2 First and second person pronouns across subcorpora 213
8.4 First and second person pronouns within direct speech
in news articles 215
8.5 First and second person pronouns outside
of direct speech in news articles 233
8.6 First person singular pronouns across different types of articles 237
8.7 Summary and conclusion 242
chapter 9
Conclusion 245
References 257
Appendix A. List of articles 271
Appendix B. Statistical tests 281
Author index 291
Subject index 293

List of tables
Table 2.1 Dimensions and features of personalisation 35
Table 3.1 Overview of collected online data in number of articles 43
Table 3.2 Overview of collected online data in number of words 43
Table 3.3 Overview of collected data from the Times from 1985 in number
of articles and number of words 48
Table 3.4 Frequency of direct speech in two subsets of the news articles
from the Times Online 57
Table 4.1 Characteristics of the commenting function across news sites 71
Table 4.2 Rejection rates of comments on 13 discussions rated
“most popular now” on BBC News 73
Table 5.1 Visual elements in news articles from five online news sites
and the printed Times from 1985 95
Table 5.2 Visual elements in news articles reporting on the Edlington case 115
Table 5.3 Image content in news articles reporting on the Edlington case
(classification based on Wardle 2007) 118
Table 6.1 Presence of different types of actors by topic category, based on
176 news articles from five online news sites and the Times from 1985 135
Table 6.2 Content categorisation of news articles from five online news sites
and the Times from 1985 138
Table 6.3 Name formats referring to news actors (based on Jucker 1996: 378) 141
Table 6.4 Selection of descriptive labels referring to Fiona Donnison 141
Table 6.5 Content analysis of news articles reporting on the Edlington case,
published on 22 January 2010. Words by category in percent
(and absolute) 150
Table 7.1 Faithfulness claims in different forms of speech representation
according to Jucker (2006: 109) 166
Table 7.2 Number of words within direct speech in news articles from five
online news sites and the Times from 1985 183
Table 7.3 Number of words within direct speech in world news and UK news
articles from four online news sites and the Times from 1985 185
Table 7.4 Number of words within direct speech in news articles, soft news
articles and columns from two online news sites 185
Table 7.5 Results of reliability testing for the classification of sources based
on 120 quotes 191