Writing business news:

how journalists ply their trade

WRITING BUSINESS NEWS INTRODUCTION

News writing in a flat world

In their content analysis of UK print journalism, Lewis et al. (2008) provide evidence for the journalistic reliance on
public relations (PR) and press agency (PA) copy. The authors attribute this source reliance to an increased workload,
staff cuts and dwindling sales, a claim they back up with interview data, employment figures, profit margins and
pagination patterns at UK national newspapers. However, missing in their political economy of PR & PA copy uptake
by journalists, is an account of how journalists actually knock PR copy "into shape". It is within this remit that my
linguistic ethnography of desktop newswriting should be situated.

THEORETICAL ALIGNMENT
Towards a social science of language-in-society
My thesis aligns with five research traditions: and feeds into public and academic discourses about:
• (Critical) Discourse Analysis (Richardson, Cotter) • the quality of (business) news
• Media anthropology (Peterson, Berkowitz) • the agency of news practitioners
• News sociology (Cottle, Deuze) • the process of news production
• Linguistic Ethnography (Rampton, Bucholtz) • newsroom (re)organization
• Writing process analysis (Perrin, Van Waes) • a mediascape in flux

DATA COLLECTION,
SELECTION & ANALYSIS

Data collection Data selection Data analysis

Fieldwork (6 months, 2006-07) in Construction of a ‘core dataset’ to A combination of methods:

a Dutch-language newsroom in
Brussels resulted in a corpus of:
• digital data (pictures, audio,
video & keystroke logging) and
• analog data (official documents,
fieldnotes & print-outs)
which I hold myself accountable:
• 22 logged writing processes
• 20 retrospective interviews
• 53 story meetings
• 100+ source texts, memos,
emails, briefs
• quantitative cluster analyses
• writing process analysis
• ‘telling’ rather than ‘typical’
ethnographic case studies
• discourse analytical concepts

A LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY
of BUSINESS NEWS PRODUCTION

Chapter Breakdown Data Research question Status

1. Introduction Outline of relevant research in preparation
traditions, overall rationale

2. Writing news 2.1 Description 22 Inputlog files How do journalists write from sources? in preparation
2.2 Data coding
2.3 Cluster analysis
2.4 Results

An ethnography of news production must account for (Peterson 2003: 162):

3. Newsroom technology "producers' engagements with the Gazprom How does a digital editorial platform affect in press
technologies of production" the journalist’s framing practices?

4. Newsroom practices
"the myriad practices [at stake] ...
statuses, identities, pleasures, and
knowledges, as well as money "
53 story meetings How do displays of evidence, story in preparation
placement negotiations, use of reporter
voice,… accomplish interactional tasks such
as displaying professional competence,
expertise, status and so on?

5. Interpretive creativity "the interpretive practices that Apple TV How do reporters make sense of the in preparation
producers bring to their task" various sources, narratives and frames
around them and channel these into one
final news story?

6. Entextualization practices "the roles played by consumption in stock market news How do financial journalists source in preparation
producers' entextualization practices" forward-looking financial reports such as
buy-sell advice?

7. Conclusion Implications and further research in preparation

NewsTalk&Text Supervision by Prof. Geert Jacobs

Ghent University Research Group on News Production Processes Research by Tom Van Hout
www.ntt.ugent.be Dept. of Language & Communication | Faculty of Arts
Ghent University | tom.vanhout@ugent.be