Research Network on Media Linguistics: Postfoundational Approaches to Newsmaking

The Research Network on Media Linguistics is pleased to announce that the book project on postfoundational approaches to newsmaking (Benjamins) is nearing completion. Edited by Jana Declercq (Groningen), Geert Jacobs (Ghent), Felicitas MacGilchrist (Georg Eckert, Braunschweig) and Astrid Vandendaele (Ghent/Leiden), the volume brings together wide-ranging new research that showcases and reflects on forms of engagement, collaboration and participation characterising contemporary news practices. The key argument is that engagement, collaboration and participation are no longer key words for a vision, goal or emerging practice in journalism and elsewhere, but are now sedimented as the common-sense baseline for everyday newsmaking practices. The question is not ‘whether’ to engage with the news’ publics, but ‘how’ to engage with them. This argument unfolds across seven newsmaking contexts, from analytics-based online headline testing, free marketeers’ ontologically ambivalent attempts to engage publics, collaborative science journalism, the writing of journalistic texts, the craft of national and community journalists to journalists’ use of social media.