Abstracts

This panel presents three different perspectives on the writing process of one newspaper article about a product launch, including the journalist's own take. You can download the newspaper article [here] and the press release on which it is based [here]. English translations are included.

1. Wim De Preter, De Standaard

Even the highly educated readers of a 'quality newspaper' like De Standaard face a lot of questions about the digital world and the technological choices that are in front of them. Convergence between the television and online media is clearly one of the big trends which are confronting them. This was the main reason for publishing a story in my newspaper about the Belgian launch of the 'Apple TV', a device that can stream audiovisual content from a pc to a television set.

Although this article is based on a press release from Apple, I tried to avoid the commercial bias as much as possible. I did this in several ways: eliminating non-factual and non-relevant information from the press release; adding some context to the facts; adding information about the technical limitations of this product; and adopting a more neutral writing style, while addressing readers in a direct way.

Wim De Preter is a senior business reporter for the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. He primarily covers the ICT news beat.

2. Henk Pander Maat, UiL-OTS, Utrecht University

How a corporate press release is unfit to print – a corpus-informed case study of the journalistic reworking of a press release

In the past few years, I have studied the somewhat uneasy marriage between corporate press releases and the news reports based on them. To be sure, releases are 'preformulated' to some extent: they adopt a number of structural and stylistic features that are characteristic of news reports, as Jacobs has shown. But the differences between the two genres are just as telling. In corpus analyses, it was shown that newspaper journalists massively rewrite release material, both in order to make it more readable and to neutralize it.

Much of this work was based on sentence-by-sentence comparisons of releases and reports. While valuable, this method cannot show us reworking strategies on higher text levels. In my paper, I will focus on our Apple TV-case and will first mention a number of local transformations that illustrate the readability and neutralization orientations revealed in earlier studies. Then I will discuss how the readability and neutralization orientations work on higher levels of structure. Finally, going beyond earlier work, I will discuss two other journalistic orientations that guide higher level reworking strategies: maximizing news value and broadening the context.

Henk Pander Maat is an Associate Professor at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His research interests include the analysis of coherence relations, genre analysis and readability research.

3. Tom Van Hout, NewsTalk&Text, Ghent University

Need for speed: reproductive writing strategies in news production

This paper offers a behind-the-scenes look at the discursive practices a business journalist employs while writing a newspaper article announcing the product launch of Apple TV on the Belgian market. Firstly, participant observation and interview data were used to contextualize story selection, sourcing, planning and structure. Secondly, the actual writing process was recorded online using keystroke logging and screen recording software. The combination of these two data collection methods yields an upclose look at agency in the immediate context of desktop news production.

In particular, I illustrate how the journalist writes reproductively, i.e. how he transforms various news sources (a corporate press release, an online news article and interview notes) into a newspaper article. Arguing that these reproductive strategies allow him to work fast and efficiently, I conclude by comparing pause times and revision behavior in the final paragraph.

Tom Van Hout is a doctoral candidate at Ghent University (Belgium) and a founding member of NT&T. His main research interest is in organizational discourse, particularly media language and business communication.