The Type and Organization of Newspaper Texts

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2. The Type and Organization of Newspaper Texts

Recently, printed newspapers are experimenting with ways to survive in the digital age. Their efforts to stay alive are directed at two areas: cutting costs and increasing revenue. Cost-cutting efforts have ranged from mild to the extreme. Sharing certain stories is one of them. This has been done by two American newspapers, The Washington Post which shares stories with The Baltimore Sun. The most drastic cost-cutting step of all is dropping the print edition altogether and becoming an online-only publication. The example is the Ann Arbor News in Michigan, stopped its printed operation and become AnnArbor.com Dominick, 2010: 114-115. Talking about online newspapers, Dominick 2010: 121 explains that there are three main types of online newspaper web sites: 1 news aggregators, 2 online web sites associated with a local or national print newspaper and 3 online-only sites. News aggregators are sites that take information from many sources and meld it into a news presentation. According to Dominick, there are two types of news aggregators. First, sites that use an automatic formula to scan news publications and group related stories together, such as Google News and Yahoo News. Second, sites that use humans to scan and select the stories, such as The Huffington Post. These sites typically carry headlines, photos, video, a lead sentence or two, and links to the full story. The second type, online Web sites associated with a local or national print newspapers are the most common one. Dominick 2010 further explains that the vast majority of online newspapers are affiliated with traditional print 14 newspapers, either dailies or weeklies. Sometimes, this type also posts pictures and video links along with the articles. The structure of this online newspaper varies. Some sites have a stand-alone organization with staffers who work only for the online site. Other sites combine the print and online operations so that one person may work for both. Based on this explanation, it can be deduced that the effectiveness of the workers is also varied. If they work for both print and online newspapers, they have to be very effective in writing the article in terms of time and space. They have to be able to manage their words so that it can be adjusted for both types. Dominick also further explains that the writing style for online media is highly variable. Some newspaper sites may simply post the print version post the story without minor editing. Meanwhile, other sites might post the headline and a couple of sentences highlighting the main points of the story with a link to the rest of the story. “The newspaper inverted-pyramid style is generally used, and photos and video are integrated to the text” Dominick, 2010: 319. According to Blake, Inverted-pyramid style is one of the styles in newspaper writing. Inverted-pyramid means when the news is written, the most newsworthy information is put at the beginning of the story and the least newsworthy information is put at the end. The decision of putting that comes as the most trustworthy is by considering its news value. http:kelab.tamu.eduspb_encyclopediadataInverted20pyramid20story20f ormat.pdf. Therefore, the idea of inverted writing style is putting all information about “what”, “when”, “where”, “who”, “why”, and “how” at the beginning of the 15 newspaper article. Then, the detailed information will be put on the following paragraphs. Here is the example of inverted-pyramid style taken from http:kelab.tamu.eduspb_encyclopediadataInverted20pyramid20story20f ormat.pdf. Figure 1. The beginning of inverted-pyramid style The example above summarizes the points that should be included in the beginning of a story using inverted-pyramid style. The “what” there is there is a man died. The “when” and “where” is on Monday afternoon and on Broad Street. The “who” is a Murfressboro man. The “why” is he died because his car spun out of control and crashed into a utility pole and threw him through the windshield. By looking at the example above, there is an advantage of having inverted- pyramid style in a newspaper article. The advantage is that readers who are in a hurry can grasp the information needed by reading the first paragraph only. Related to the style of writing, news writers are usually faithful to the conversations of good English except when departing from the rules help them communicate better with their mass audience. Itule and Anderson 1999: 177 say that writers who understand and appreciate the rules of language know when to break the rules and enhance effectiveness. If poets do it with unusual indentations, mid-sentence capitalization, news writers take the liberties of the language by dropping the articles like “a” and “the”, using colons and single quotation marks A Murfreesboro man died Monday afternoon when his car spun out of control on rain-slickened Broad Street, crashed into a utility pole and threw him through the windshield. 16 to indicate attribution and so on. They provide examples of these liberties which are taken from USA Today during the 1991 Persian Gulf War: a. Troops set; Bush ‘prepared’ for ground war b. Poll: Most support U.S in gulf war c. Bush ‘prepared’ for Ground War The examples above show the liberties which are often taken by news writers. In example a, the semicolon ; is used in order to show two different actions which still has relationship to one another. In example b, the colon : is possibly used to replace the verbs ‘says’ or ‘states’ and it is possibly used to shorten the sentence since it is a headline. In example c, the single quotation mark is put on the verb ‘prepared’ because it possibly signs that Bush has been ready since a long time ago to face Ground War. The examples below are the examples of another liberty takes by news writers, it is the determiner deletion. The study of determiner deletion in newspaper is proposed by Bell 2011: a. the Finance Minister Bill English b. a City Council spokesperson Richie Moyle c. its Chief Executive Roger Sutton. The examples given by Bell include initial mentions of people in the news which usually take the form of two appositional noun phrases. The first noun phrase is the descriptive of the person and it is followed by an appositional noun phrase which names the person. In language of news reporting, the deletion of the first of 17 the appositional expressions is often defined as something unique. The deletion restructures the apposition because it elevates the name to equal status with the description.

3. Stylistics Analysis Theory