Learning outcomes

The course aims at developing the ability to analyze and produce a journalistic piece in its different forms, be it a written text (print / on-line version) or a broadcast piece. The students will be shown how to identify and reproduce the stylistic and textual features of journalistic texts, bearing in mind the cultural-ideological background against which a report, a feature or a commentary is set.
During the course, journalistic texts in languages other than English will be discussed as well.

Program

Pre-requisites
Entry level required: C1 (advanced), according to the European framework.

Programme
 History of journalism: the basics
 News reporting
 Features
 Commentaries and editorials
 Subediting
 Broadcast journalism
 Court reporting
 Interviewing
 Freelancing
 Media law
 Professional ethics
 Ideology in journalism

Teaching methodology
Lectures, tutorials, seminars and practice sessions.


Reference text
Facchinetti, Roberta, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös, Udo Fries (2012) News as Changing Texts. Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Further texts will be handed out during the lessons.

Examination Methods

Exam structure: written.

NB: Students intending to take this exam are strongly advised to attend the lessons.

INFORMATION FOR NON-ATTENDERS

Students who do not attend the course have to study in detail the following references:

• Banks, David and Mark Hanna 2009. McNae’ Essential Law for Journalists, 20th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bell, Martin 2010. “The death of news”. British Journalism Review 21/1. 73-74
• Bown, Lesley and Ann Gawthorpe (2008) Teach Yourself. Writing for Magazines. London: Hachette Livre UK Company.
• Boyd, Andrew (2001) 5th ed. Broadcast Journalism: Techniques of Radio and Television News, Amsterdam: Elsevier.
• Brownlees, Nicholas (1999) Corantos and Newsbooks: Language and Discourse in the First English Newspapers (1620-1641). Edizioni ETS, Pisa.
• Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2010. “Self-mediation: New media and citizenship”. Critical Discourse Studies 7/4. 227-232.
• Clayman Steven and John Heritage (2002) The News Interview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Conboy, Martin. 2010. The Language of Newspapers: Socio-Historical Perspectives. London: Continuum.
• Cotter, Colleen 2011. “Women's place at the Fourth Estate: Constraints on voice, text, and topic”, Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 43/10, pp. 2519-2533.
• Craig, David. 2011. Excellence in Online Journalism. Exploring Current Practices in an Evolving Environment. London: SAGE.
• Deuze, Mark 2008. “Understanding journalism as newswork: How it changes, and how it remains the same”. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, University of Westminster, London, Vol. 5(2): 4-23.
• Devereux, Eoin. 2007. Understanding the Media. London: SAGE.
• Facchinetti, Roberta, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Boes, Udo Fries. 2012. News as Changing Texts. Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
•Fries, Udo, Viviane Müller and Peter Schneider (eds.) (1997) From Ælfric to the New York Times. Studies in English Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• Hennessy, Brendan 2006. 4th ed. Writing Feature Articles. A Practical Guide to Methods and Markets. Oxford: Focal Press.
• Hoey, Michael 2001. Textual Interaction. An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis. London, Routledge.
• Huls Erica and Jasper Varwijk 2011. “Political bias in TV interviews”. Discourse and Society 22(1): 48-65.
• Jucker, Andreas 1992. Social Stylistics, Syntactic Variation in British Newspapers. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Jucker, Andreas H. (1986) News Interviews: A Pragmalinguistic Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Lee Wright, Peter 2010. New Media, Old News. London: SAGE.
• Quinn, Stephen 2001. Digital Sub-editing and Design, Oxford: Focal Press.
• Reese, Stephen D., Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyun and Jaekwan Jeong. 2007. “Mapping the blogosphere: Professional and citizen-based media in the global news arena”. Journalism 8/3. 235-261.
• Ungerer, Friedrich 2002. “When news stories are no longer stories: The emergence of the top-down structure in news reports in English newspapers”. In Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie and Hans Martin Lehmann (eds.) Text Types and Corpora. Studies in Honour of Udo Fries, Gunter Narr: Tübingen, pp. 91-104.
• Van Dijk, Teun A. 1988. News as Discourse. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London.
• Van Hout, Tom and Geert Jacobs. 2010. News production theory and practice: Fieldwork notes on power, interaction and agency. Pragmatics 18/1. 59-85.
• Williams, Kevin. 2010. Read All About It! A History of the British Newspaper. London, N.Y.: Routledge.

Moreover, in order to give the exam, non-attenders have to send the teacher 3 news reports, 3 features, 3 commentaries and 3 TV packages one week before the exam. The assessment of such texts will be integral part of the exam.

The exam for non-attenders will be structured as follows:
1) Written questions on the above-mentioned bibliographic references;
2) Writing of a journalistic piece;
3) Analysis of a journalistic piece and identification of its textual type.