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 newlydeveloped framework of analysis in approaching the study of News Discourse. Originatedwithin the field of Media Discourse analysis, the Discursive News Values Analysisapproach (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 seesnews values as a “quality of texts” (Caple & Bednarek, 2016, p. 13, emphasis in theoriginal) rather than as something linked to the event reported itself. Their analysis canthus allow us to “systematically investigate how these values are constructed in thedifferent types of textual material involved in the news process” (Bednarek & Caple2012b, 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 caseof corpora representative of specific media events or specific genres. In this way, the combination of Discursive News Values Analysis andcorpus linguistic methodologies can be used to better define how news stories are reportedin news tickers since, by underlining what is newsworthy for a particular newsorganisation, they can help researchers ‘sneak a peek’ into the professional practices at the very heart of the news production process.