Riassunto esame Inglese, prof. Maci, libro consigliato Changing channels, Mansfield

Chapter 1: The channels of communication

The fact that we will choose one channel of information rather than another may depend on a number of factors, such as where we are, what we are doing at the time, the amount of time we have and so on. Whatever our preferred means, very often we will make use of more than one channel available, again according to our purpose and possibly to the time available.

The news events will differ in their presentation according to the spoken or written medium in which they are reported. The way in which the news is reported will reflect the conditions of representation imposed on it by the channel of communication.

Reasons why we study the media

• Interest in some aspect of media language in its own right
• Interest in the way the media use some language feature also found in ordinary speech
• How the media communication situation manipulates language in a revealing way
• Media’s role in affecting language in a wider society
• Media as a mirror of society and culture
• How media language affects attitudes and opinions in society through the way it presents people and issues

Inverted pyramid: the most important parts of the news are transmitted first to be followed by background information. The essential nature of each channel conditions not only the way the message is relayed but also its content. It imposes certain strategies that the newswriter must use to convince the audience to read on or remain tuned to the station.

Categorisation of field, tenor and mode

• Field: the nature of the situation in which the communication takes place and its content. It’s quite clear who the participants are (writer and reader) and what their purpose is (provide and receive information).
• Tenor: the social relationships of the participants. In the paper press, we have a more or less formal register according to whether that paper is classified quality or popular.
• Mode: the means of transmission, basically the spoken or written code.

Newsworthiness

What is being considered worthy of being included in the newspaper, on the radio or TV or internet. What is considered to be classified as news

Characteristics of the news

• Relevance: somehow the event reported will affect the lives of the audience
• Timeliness: the emphasis on the news is always on what is happening now or has just happened
• Simplification: stories need to be told using a simple form and structure
• Predictability: many stories deal with events that are known about in advance and noted in the reporter’s diary (national anniversaries, state occasions, celebrity weddings, ...)
• Unexpectedness: events that were not expected in any way and may shock for their tragic nature or delight
• Continuity: many stories are updates of previous events
• Composition: the aim is to offer a wide selection of news stories in each edition
• Elite people: newspapers like to cover stories about celebrities and well-known people
• Elite nations: important countries such as USA and Europe receive wider coverage than developing nations
• Negativity: bad news is generally considered to be of more interest than good news

The kind of stories presented will reflect those categories of newsworthiness. Emergencies, crime, government matters, planning and developments, conflict and controversy, industry, health, human interest, personalities, sport, seasonal news, special local interest, weather, traffic, animals. Hard news topics come before soft news in any of the media.

The written text may be accompanied by a visual one (ex: photo) which enhances the meaning of the story or explains it in some way: the text and image may be interdependent, with the headline referring to the content of the picture; in some cases, the one can’t exist without the other. It’s impossible to find a visual without a written text.

The newspaper

It’s basically a one-way channel in the sense that the reader has no direct contact or immediate response back to the source. The writer prepares the text with the reader in mind, knowing that he will ask the traditional Wh- questions: where, what, when, who, why and how.

Interdependency between the images and the written text, where the former relies on the latter for contextualisation and comment and the latter on the former for completion of meaning or to give a visual representation of the main actor of the news event.

A page of news will contain more than one article or news story but a news story may be carried through to another page, not because there’s not enough space for it there, but because it’s one of a number that have been assigned front page worthiness. This means that one or more columns of the article (leading article) will be given space, but then readers are referred to an inside page to complete the reading. This choice corresponds to the concept of the inverted pyramid where the most important information appears at the beginning of the article (leader).

The body copy of the main story envelops a block of information called teaser, referring to related stories regarding a particular news story. Story 2 shows the photo of the reporter to the left under the headline and above the lead paragraph. Story 3 envelops a cartoon relating the story. At the top of the page, above the masthead, there are also teasers telling the reader where to find other lead stories. There’s also always an advertisement in the second half of the main page to the right.

The order of news topics across the pages is fixed. The reader will always find international and national events in the first pages, followed by other topics such as business, cultural events, and sport. News stories in the press are organised in such a way as to pack in as much information as possible into the limited space made available. Very common are noun group structure and disjunctive language in headlines which are written to attract attention and to stimulate the reader’s curiosity.

The radio

It’s traditionally known as the blind medium, since by its very nature it cannot exploit the visual medium. This is left to the listener to imagine for him according to what he hears from the news presenter. Radio transmits today’s news at regular intervals. It can interrupt its programs to report even the most recent events occurring just minutes earlier, the so-called breaking-news.

Radio news has a fixed order: headlines, bulletin, and summary which obviously can’t be changed by the listener, who must follow the programme from beginning to end. Whereas the newspaper is conditioned in its reporting by restrictions of physical space on the page, the radio is equally limited by the more frequent time restrictions imposed on the numerous editions throughout the day. Sound quality may vary from one news bulletin to the next due to the piecing together of parts of previous news bulletins read by the same reader.

The fact that people nowadays listen to the radio and do something else is one of the reasons why the intonation and the stressing of content words is so important in this channel.

The television

It’s not a blind medium of communication. It provides today’s news. It has immediate links to the outside world and to the reporter on the spot, so that the viewers have a sense of being present at the event themselves. Television transmits at regular intervals during the day or on a twenty-four-hour basis. The programmes are of different lengths; on some channels, two programmes are broadcast one after the other, the first, for example, being of a more local or regional nature, and the second containing the national and international news.

Infotainment: news programmes are slotted into other lighter and more entertaining programmes, which feature a wide range of topics of newsworthy interest to do with health, women’s rights, etc. A feature of the early morning programmes is the reading of the day’s newspapers, focusing on the main news items and opinions which the TV camera closes in on so that the viewer can get a glimpse of underlined or highlighted headlines and relevant pieces of information on the page.

Television broadcasting imposes a fixed order in which news is presented; the more traditional order is that of summary headlines and bulletin while some channels also provide a summary at the end of the programme (ex: BBC World). More recently on commercial TV and particularly in Italy, an initial teaser is provided during the last minutes of a quiz show in which the main pre-headlines are announced. This is a technique for enticing the viewer to stay tuned. These teasers are designed to hold the viewers’ attention till the end of the programme, necessary due to the fixed order imposed by the channel.

News is generally given in order of newsworthiness, from the more to the less serious items of news. Sport is always in the second slot of the programme. News stories will be edited. The splicing together of news film is evident due to the visual medium. The visual medium with moving images and the potential of exploiting the written and spoken codes at the same time enhances the sense of immediacy.

The participants of a news programme are nowadays quite numerous. The modern tendency is to have more than one presenter in the studio, most often a male and a female, both facing the camera. There’s a great number of outside reporters, who will usually appear on the screen behind the newscasters who may even turn their backs to the camera to face them if they set up a question-answer or two-way session. Another technique is for the reporter and news presenter to be seen side by side on a video wall facing the camera. Experts may be present in the studio.

Finally, television exploits the written medium with teletext. It’s confined to words or at most icons on some pages, layout and graphics are very simple. It offers quick updating of breaking news. The immediacy with which the news is reported is betrayed by signs of haste due to typing errors which will disappear later.

The internet

It has come to revolutionise not only the way in which information can be stored and retrieved, but also the technological means with which it can be provided and in what form. All main radio and TV stations and newspapers all have a web page which they use to transmit the same information in an alternative format to the more traditional one.

The storing and retrieval of information is no longer a problem because space is no longer a problem. Like the traditional newspaper, the internet offers no fixed order of access to the news. After entering the home page, users are guided in their choice by links to other pages containing the news they are interested in. The users can access far beyond the day’s edition of the news. Therefore, internet users don’t read linearly but non-sequentially as they click to navigate backwards and forwards in search of the information they’re interested in. What the users have to rely on are the hot words and icons positioned around each screen and within a news text.

While filled with links in and around it, the text on screen is usually less dense, with a single or up to a maximum of 3 sentences per paragraph, and with more space between one paragraph and the next than in the traditional printed text. Some newspapers have links to radio and TV stations so that users can listen or watch the news as well as read it on the site.

Characteristics of the media

• Newspaper: written text to be read, supportive visual (still)
• Radio: spoken text, spontaneous spoken text, semi-prepared spoken text, written text to be read aloud
• Television & Internet: spoken text, spontaneous spoken text, semi-prepared spoken text, written text to be read aloud, written text to be read, supportive visual (still), supportive visual (moving)

Chapter 2: The newspaper

The news in print must necessarily hit the eye of the reader in order to capture his attention in order to be read rather than discarded as uninteresting. Hence the importance of all those graphical features that are typical of the layout of the newspaper (size and character of headline, insertion of visual, use of columns, etc.).

As far as the language of the individual written text is concerned, the writer is restricted in the ways in which he can convey intended meaning. What is obviously lacking is the spoken voice with all those common features whose function, among others, is to disambiguate and clarify.

Language and format are exploited in different ways according to whether the newspaper is of the popular (The Sun, The Mirror) or quality kind (The Independent, The Times).

• Quality: language relatively complex in structure, literary in vocabulary and objective in tone
• Popular: language relatively simple in structure, colloquial in vocabulary and emotive or sensational in tone

This language distinction is also reflected in the spacing of the content, graphics, and layout. As regards content, quality papers give more space to serious news of negative newsworthiness, such as national and international crises, politics, or important issues regarding health and environment. The headlines might be written in fairly small case letters, varying in size from the main to the sub-headline beneath. Photographs are included but are possibly smaller and fewer than in tabloids.

Tabloids (popular newspapers) give greater space to stories of human interest, especially related to famous personalities or to dramatic situations involving people from all walks of life. Sport and entertainment are high on the list of priorities. They have enormous headlines and a lot of space is dedicated to photos of people. The lettering of those headlines and captions may also be extremely big in heavy bold print, very often completed by an exclamation or question mark.

In the stories themselves, great use will be made of black letters on white and vice versa and other graphic devices (dots, asterisks and exclamation marks to avoid printing taboo words).

The participants of this media are the writer and the reader. The writer has to take in consideration not only what he wants the reader to learn but also what he thinks the reader will want to know having read the headline or seen the visual. Explicit dialogue between the two interactants in which the writer of any kind of text predicts the questions that the reader will ask of it.

Anyway, there are other participants that the news writer will call upon to add their own voice to the relating of the story in question. These participants may be informants from the press agency, witness at the scene, a politician, a financial consultant, etc. And they give their contribution to the story for the very reason that the writer must give the impression of basing the news story on facts retrieved (quoting the reliable source). Such participation may take the form of direct or indirect speech.

Direct and indirect speech

• Direct speech: it provides the actual words spoken, using simple introductory verbs either at the beginning, end or in the middle of the statement. It’s essential that the introductory stating verb appears, since its function is to indicate the real source of information
  Ex: ‘I am actively supporting David Davis’, Kalms said.
• Indirect speech: the choice of an introducing verb will indicate the attitude of the speaker, his/her state of knowledge (doubt, certainty) and reveal the illocutionary force of the utterance.
  Ex: Aziz supporters claim he is [...]

Unusual combination of direct and indirect speech where only the most important content words of the message are placed between inverted commas.
Ex: He urged politicians to stop ‘flying kites’ and announcing ‘quick fix’ policies rather than getting to grips with the crisis of youth custody, [...]

Important is the use of modality in news reporting by means in which the reporter takes more or less responsibility for the accuracy of what he’s written. Modality expresses the writer’s judgement on the truth of what is represented in the clause or sentence and it can be realised in a number of ways: verbs, adjectives, adverbs and nouns. Three levels of credibility in modality: low modality, median modality, high modality.

News stories are full of hedging, expressed by adverbs (apparently, supposedly) and conditional form verbs (would appear to, is believed to be) all involving the more or less direct intervention of other people that interact with the reporter from within the text. A mechanism of indicating the active participation of the source of information as apparent spontaneous provider of news rather than being interviewed, is to make the newspaper the direct receiver or beneficiary of the message. This implies the exclusivity of the news story to the particular newspaper.
Ex: MPs told The Observer that [...]

Newspaper stories have a number of easily recognisable component parts, all of which contain different devices that relate them to each other in the creation of a coherent whole. These are the headline, lead paragraph and main body copy of the news story.

The headline

Headlines are an interesting source of language study for a number of reasons: the form they take, what they contain and which of the wh- questions are answered. A first basic distinction that needs to be made is between summary and connotative headlines, both written in larger and bolder print than the news story itself.

The purpose of summary headlines is to give the reader the gist of the news item to follow and they may take up a whole line of print. As a result, the reader is immediately informed of both the subject matter and the newsworthiness of the article to follow.
Ex: Pope Benedict: his role in the Nazi years
Police plea after gang attack

Connotative headlines are far more interesting to analyse. Their function is to arouse the reader’s curiosity about the news that follows. Both quality and popular newspapers make use of connotative headlines but they appear to be more frequent in the tabloids.
Ex: WAD A CHEEK
WE CAN’T W8 – Sir Bob’s Armada sets sail

The process of interpretation isn’t slowed down in any way by these invented forms; the reader’s background will be called into play for interpretation. The block language of headlines is partly determined by the lack of space that the printed...