A Critical Discourse Portrait of the Total News Person

Several works on the importance of journalism training have paid attention to the need for journalists to perfect trade skills in news gathering, reporting and writing. Little or no attention has been paid to news writing as a social practice. This paper has been designed to draw attention to the necessity that news writing involves language use with society in mind and, therefore, the function of language in news writing is that of social practice. The news writer is involved in the social practice. Theoretical and methodological insights have been drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the relevance of news writing to the news writer’s job of information dissemination and ideology formation in text. Examples to demonstrate this fact were drawn from the analysis of some newspaper headlines collected as data for this work. News writing as a social practice, the paper posits, positions the writer in the stead of power ownership, mind influencer and silent conditioner of text consumers’ stance. The paper then concludes that training in journalism should incorporate facts about the news writer as a social practice and, therefore, the language of journalism must be taught with the aim of showing critical language awareness strategies that encourage the realisation of news writing as a social practice