News as changing texts: Corpora, methodologies and analysis (second edition)

The updated and revised edition of this volume maintains its focus on the dialectic interrelation between \u2018news\u2019 and \u2018change\u2019. News is intended as a textual type in its evolutionary \u2013 and revolutionary \u2013 development, while change is discussed with reference to the form, content and structure of news texts. The news texts in question range from the first forms of periodical news in the seventeenth century up to the news blogs and social media of the present day. Divided into four chapters, representing key historical moments in the process of news writing, each chapter makes use of a set of corpora specifically designed to suit the needs of scholars working in those particular fields. Topics that the authors examine include pronominal usage and the interrelationship between news writer and reader, heads and headlines, the language of advertisements and other text classes, the trend towards conversationalization, and impartiality and \u2018perspective\u2019 in modern-day news. These and other topics, coupled with the varying corpora that are exploited to analyse them, call into question basic methodological issues that are examined from different perspectives. Throughout the volume, the authors contextualise the news publications of the day so as to better understand the continuous process of adjustment and renewal that news texts are subject to over time

Books in the News in Cromwellian England

This article offers detailed analysis of the patterns of book advertising in Marchamont Nedham’s government-sponsored newsbook, Mercurius Politicus. It contends that, for a brief period, Politicus was the nearest thing that the mid-seventeenth century had to a literary periodical and contests standard accounts that Politicus was only successful because government monopoly made it so. Instead I show that Politicus was instrumental in creating an image of the Commonwealth and Protectorate as a Republic of Letters; the cheap print of its small advertisements insisted that the publication of a book was an event, that London was a city of the book, and that its inhabitants might respond to the uncertainty of political revolution by eagerly imagining a future comprised of new books as yet unread

Editing and analysing Early Modern news: an expert panel report

An expert panel linked to the research project News, Networks and Users in the Hybrid Media System. Transformation of the Media Industry and the News in the Pots-Industrial Era was held on the 22th of April, 2021, to discuss about the significance and treatment, through digital tools, of the very first news published in periodical papers in the Early Modern world, both in Europe and in America. In that seminar we had a number of the highest reputed scholars on this specific topic: Nicholas Brownlees, Joad Raymond, Paul Firbas and Carmen Espejo-Cala. Questions such as how to create and handle an electronic corpus, how to manage big data related to Early modern news, how to annotate such corpora or how to analyse different aspects of the first newsbooks and gazettes were some of the topics developed in some detail. Some directions for the future were suggested as well.This paper is one of the results of the research project News, networks, and users in the hybrid media system. Transformation of media industries and the news in the post-industrial era (RTI2018-095775-B-C43) (Mineco/Feder), Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Competitiveness (2019-2021)