Online news reporting : a comparative textual analysis of hard news live blogs and traditional online news articles and a reader response analysis using appraisal
Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis investigates the differences between live blogs and traditional online news articles, and differences in how readers evaluate them. Building on developments in reader response studies, news media studies, and studies of evaluative language, I analysed live blogs and traditional online news articles for their structure and use of evaluative language. I show how live blogs present news events as more temporally close to the reader than traditional online news articles and ascribe evaluations of the reported news events to news actors, while traditional online news articles present evaluations ofthe news events more often as objective. Additionally, I conducted twenty interviews in an experimental setting with live blog or traditional online news article readers. I used qualitative linguistic analysis to investigate evaluations of the news texts and evaluations of the news events following the Appraisal framework. This analysis showed that all readers implicitly evaluated news events following news values. It also showed that readers of live blogs were more likely than traditional online news article readers to evaluate news events as affective, ascribing these evaluations to the inclusion of social media, primarily Tweets, in the live blogs.
Authors: Van Driel, Martine Alexandra
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2906370010