Discursive perspectives on news production

This special issue marks a significant step in the development of a linguistics of news production. It is part of a long tradition in media studies which started in the 1970s with a number of ethnographies conducted by news sociologists who went into newsrooms and whose observational studies of news organisations provided the first insights into how the news is actually made (Golding and Elliott, 1979; Schlesinger, 1987; Tuchman, 1978). More recently, researchers from a wide range of discourse-related disciplines have started to insist that we investigate the discursive processes that shape the news product (Bell and Garrett, 1998; Carvalho, 2008; Cotter, 2010; Deacon et al., 1999; Perrin, 2003; Philo, 2007; Schrøder, 2007). This collection of articles can be seen as an answer to that call as it takes the reader behind the scenes to get through to journalists going about their daily business of making news: all of the research presented here moves beyond the text-oriented analysis of the syntax of newspaper headlines or the turn-taking mechanisms of broadcast interviews and instead proposes a hands-on, holistic focus on the process of news production