The Multimodal Analysis of Online Newspapers

What epistemological differences exist between printed and online newspapers and how can these differences be investigated? What impact do online newspapers have on the way news is constructed and interpreted? What can multimodal and intercultural analysis of online newspapers tell us about the changing experience of reading newspapers and the criteria that govern the organisation of the newspaper webpage? How useful are newspaper corpora and multimodal concordancing techniques in the creation of exam-oriented project work for both undergraduate and postgraduate students? When answering these and other questions, the volume adopts a blended multimodal and intercultural framework, backed up by guidelines and useful suggestions for exam-oriented project work. In the first section, Mariavita Cambria, taking her examples mainly from American and British newspapers, explores the effects of digital technologies on news-making and reconstructs the basic multimodal and intercultural traditions affecting printed and online newspapers. Drawing on insights from linguistics, critical semiotics, cultural studies and theories of representation, this first section equips readers with the analytical skills required to describe the world of online news. In the second section, Rosalba Rizzo exemplifies how project work can be undertaken. The main focus in this section is how to adapt various corpus-searching and concordancing techniques to the study of online regional newspapers and how these newspapers construct their relationships with their readerships in a global market. Viewing newspapers in regional vs. global terms constitutes an innovative perspective on newspapers' social function. Specifically, it posits that detailed comparisons of relative positioning will provide clues to newspapers' mediational roles in economic, political and cultural matters in specific world regions, for example, how financial crises are translated into regional outlooks by newspapers. A key point of the book is its original interpretation of information as classification, distribution and relation, an organizational principle that underpins the examples of project work given in the second section. The book thus furthers the tradition of newspaper analysis based on systemic-functional semiotics and intercultural and new-media approaches to literacy but does so from the standpoint of innovative classroom techniques. With a view to increasing the volume's applicability and flexibility in the classroom context, it will be supported by a website maintained by the authors which contains supporting materials, suggestions for class activities, lists of questions and guidelines for project work.