Discussion Topics

1. What have we learned from 30 years of media discourse analysis?
   
   A handful of hypotheses, at best. There’s nothing you can say about news products if you don’t know how they are produced. How can you analyse a newspaper headline if you don’t know whether it’s a cut-and-paste from a corporate press release?


2. Analyzing news production processes is a futile academic exercise.
   
   What’s the point of analysing news production processes if it doesn’t turn journalists into more effective writers, if it doesn’t make news consumers more critical and understanding, if it doesn’t give PR officers a better view of how to deal with the media?


3. News production analysis is biased towards writing.
   
   How can we link it up with the study of the natural talk of story meetings, journalist-source interaction and informal newsroom decision-making?


4. The focus in media discourse analysis has been to analyze news texts as texts rather than as news.
   
   What is the theoretical validity of media discourse analysis conducted in isolation from practices of media production?


5. Method: Ethnography and computer-assisted writing process analysis are ultimately incompatible.
   
   The ethnographic strand in news production studies opens discourse analysis up to media contexts and professional routines while keystroke logging zooms in on media workers' mental processes.


6. News production is the domain of sociology.
   
   What added value can we claim for a discursive approach to news production?