Mainstream Media in Contemporary Fluid News Environments: Brandcasting the News in the TV Genre of News Tickers

The following contribution focuses on a corpus-based linguistic analysis (Baker, 2006; McEnery & Hardie, 2012) of how the BBC World News uses its news tickers in order to promote itself and its 'products'. More specifically, this contribution uses a newly developed framework of analysis in approaching the study of News Discourse. Originated within the field of Media Discourse analysis, the Discursive News Values Analysis approach (Bednarek, 2016a, 2016b; Bednarek & Caple, 2012b, 2014, 2017; Caple & Bednarek, 2016) investigates "how newsworthiness is construed and established through discourse" (Bednarek & Caple, 2012b, p. 104). In this way, a discursive perspective sees news values as a "quality of texts" (Caple & Bednarek, 2016, p. 13, emphasis in the original) rather than as something linked to the event reported itself. Their analysis can thus allow us to "systematically investigate how these values are constructed in the different types of textual material involved in the news process" (Bednarek & Caple 2012b, p. 104). Therefore, through the use of corpus linguistic methodologies, we can gain "first insights into a conventionalised repertoire of rhetoric of newsworthiness" (Bednarek & Caple, 2014, p. 14) in the case of corpora representative of specific media events or specific genres. In this way, the combination of Discursive News Values Analysis and corpus linguistic methodologies can be used to better define how news stories are reported in news tickers since, by underlining what is newsworthy for a particular news organisation, they can help researchers 'sneak a peek' into the professional practices at the very heart of the news production process.