Argumentation in the Newsroom
Author
The news we see daily is selected from among alternatives by journalists. Argumentation in the Newsroom uses ethnographic data from Swiss television and print newsrooms to shed light on how journalists make decisions regarding the selection and presentation of news items in their daily professional practice. The evidence illustrates that, contrary to the standard view, journalistic decisions are not limited to the influence of standardized production patterns, instinct, or editors’ orders. Rather, in their attempt to produce the best news possible, journalists carefully ponder and discuss their choices, utilizing full-fledged critical discussions at all stages of the newsmaking process. By employing the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion in conjunction with the Argumentum Model of Topics, this study provides a detailed reconstruction of how journalists make use of argumentative reasoning, basing their decisions on a complex set of material premises and on recurrent procedural premises.
[Argumentation in Context, 13] 2017. xiii, 211 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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List of figures
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List of tables
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Abstract
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Acknowledgements
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Chapter 1. Newsmaking as an argumentative context | pp. 1–7
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Chapter 2. Newsmaking: Actors, factors, approaches | pp. 9–19
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Chapter 3. Argumentation theory: A historical summary | pp. 21–36
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Chapter 4. News values: Why do events become news? | pp. 37–44
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Chapter 5. Context: Newsmaking where? | pp. 45–63
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Chapter 6. Building a corpus: How one gets into the newsroom and what can be found there | pp. 65–72
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Chapter 7. Case studies: Collective decision-making and evaluation | pp. 73–126
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Chapter 8. Case studies: Individual decision-making and evaluation | pp. 127–144
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Chapter 9. Case studies: News products | pp. 145–177
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Chapter 10. Findings and conclusions | pp. 179–193
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Notes
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References | pp. 195–207
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Subject index | pp. 209–211
“
Argumentation in the Newsroom represents an important step forward in the analysis of contextualized argumentation in journalism. Marta Zampa writes from inside the newsroom: she gives an insightful and comprehensive perspective of how journalists use argumentation in the process of making decisions about the news, from the design phase to the final products. Supported by an impressive multilingual corpus collected in Switzerland, Marta Zampa’s analysis opens a window into how journalists weigh arguments and make their choices, alone and in interaction with others. To those who are interested not only in how context influences argumentation but also in how argumentation changes context –scholars in argumentation, communication and journalism – this book will offer food for thought.”
Sara Greco, USI - Università della Svizzera italiana
“Dr. Zampa offers genuine insights about the practice of news production with a novel analysis of argumentation in journalist decision making in the editorial room, production room, and the process of writing and video production. The application of the Argumentum Model of Topics offers an important, innovative contribution for investigating news values as these happen in the key moments of everyday journalistic practice.”
Mark Aakhus, Rutgers University
“There is much to recommend in Argumentation in the Newsroom. It is well written, with concise, useful overviews of the research on journalistic norms and media linguistics. It productively fills in a gap in that research by conceiving of gatekeeping practices and newsroom decision-making as involving argumentative reasoning, which allows Zampa to go beyond telling us what newsmakers do but how and why they do it. Zampa has collected an impressively deep corpus of data and employs innovative methods to interpret that data.”
Darrin Hicks, University of Denver, Journal of Argumentation in Context 9:2 (2020)
Cited by
Cited by 11 other publications
Haapanen, Lauri
2020. Modelling Quoting in Newswriting: A Framework for Studies on the Production of News. Journalism Practice 14:3 ► pp. 374 ff. 
Haapanen, Lauri & Leo Leppänen
Musi, Elena & Chris Reed
2022. From fallacies to semi-fake news: Improving the identification of misinformation triggers across digital media. Discourse & Society 33:3 ► pp. 349 ff.
Musi, Elena & Andrea Rocci
2022. Staying Up to Date with Fact and Reason Checking: An Argumentative Analysis of Outdated News. In The Pandemic of Argumentation [Argumentation Library, 43], ► pp. 311 ff.
Perrin, Daniel
2021. Chapter 5. “Somehow I'm Always Writing”. In Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 94], ► pp. 99 ff.
Rigotti, Eddo & Sara Greco
2019. The Inferential Configuration of Arguments: The Argumentum Model of Topics. In Inference in Argumentation [Argumentation Library, 34], ► pp. 207 ff.
Salahshour, Neda & Dimitris Serafis
2022. (De-)constructing New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern’s initiative to wear the hijab after the Christchurch terrorist attack. Journal of Argumentation in Context 11:2 ► pp. 157 ff.
Serafis, Dimitris
2022. Unveiling the rationale of soft hate speech in multimodal artefacts. Journal of Language and Discrimination
Serafis, Dimitris, Sara Greco, Chiara Pollaroli & Chiara Jermini-Martinez Soria
2020. Towards an integrated argumentative approach to multimodal critical discourse analysis: evidence from the portrayal of refugees and immigrants in Greek newspapers. Critical Discourse Studies 17:5 ► pp. 545 ff.
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Subjects
Communication Studies
Main BIC Subject
CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009030: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Pragmatics