News values in Australia Day reporting: a social semiotic approach

Abstract

This paper focuses on the visual analysis of newsworthiness, i.e. the worth of an event to be reported as news, as established via a set of news values (such as Negativity, Proximity, Eliteness, Unexpectedness, etc). Discursive news values analysis (DNVA) examines how this ‘worth’ – and these news values – are established through semiotic resources and practices. The DNVA framework has been developed in collaboration with Monika Bednarek (also presenting at ASFLA), whose research focuses on linguistic analysis. In contrast, this paper will be dedicated to examining visual resources that construct news values. The framework for visual DNVA draws on Kress & van Leeuwen’s (2006) systems for meaning making in images, Caple’s (2013) Balance Network for visual compositional meaning, and work by White (2014) and Economou (2014) on the attitudinal work of news images. Application of the framework will be demonstrated by examining visual news reporting about Australia Day over two consecutive years (2016 and 2017). The paper will also briefly explore the application of visual DNVA to news reporting in other cultural contexts, specifically in relation to the reporting of the Chinese National Holiday in the Chinese news media. The paper works as a companion piece to Monika Bednarek’s paper, but both keynotes will be presented in such a way that they make sense for those only able to attend one of the two