Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The process and practice of everyday journalism
- Part II Conceptualizing the news
- Part III Constructing the story: texts and contexts
- 7 Story design and the dictates of the “lead”
- 8 “Boilerplate”: Simplifying stories, anchoring text, altering meaning
- 9 Style and standardization in news language
- Part IV Decoding the discourse
- Conclusion and key points
- Epilogue
- Appendices
- Glossary of news and linguistic terms
- References
- Index
9 - Style and standardization in news language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The process and practice of everyday journalism
- Part II Conceptualizing the news
- Part III Constructing the story: texts and contexts
- 7 Story design and the dictates of the “lead”
- 8 “Boilerplate”: Simplifying stories, anchoring text, altering meaning
- 9 Style and standardization in news language
- Part IV Decoding the discourse
- Conclusion and key points
- Epilogue
- Appendices
- Glossary of news and linguistic terms
- References
- Index
Summary
KEY POINTS
Journalists have a very self-conscious relationship to language, meta-talk about which is part of everyday practice. Their self-identity as “protectors” of the language is part of the professional discourse from textbook to trade publication; in other words, from student days to retirement.
Journalists' language attitudes are conservative, prescriptive, and mainstream; their role in societal language standardization complex but robust. They reiterate culturally situated language norms through the processes of news production. But communicative needs can supersede prescriptive ones.
Standardization in the journalistic realm is also discursive: Well-formed news discourse is structured by a fairly strict set of rules that govern how information is selected and presented, leading to an identifiable “news style.”
While many people consider the media's handling of language an affront to good usage, the news media in fact have a fairly prescriptive and conservative, rather than innovative and laissez-faire, attitude toward language use. Print and broadcast media are concerned with maintaining their own style rules as well as upholding the mainstream language-use standards of society; copy editors (or sub-editors) actively aim to “preserve” the language. In this chapter, I orient the social and structural factors of language standardization to the practice and attitudes of the news media, noting journalism's role in influencing language style and accommodating to standard language ideologies. Additionally the news context offers something else which I detail: many instances in which communicative demands – instigated by interaction with the public or imposed by the rules of newswriting – supersede prescriptive habits.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- News TalkInvestigating the Language of Journalism, pp. 187 - 214Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010