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Online News

Chapter · April 2015

DOI: 10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi176

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Online News
ZHOUMIN YUAN
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China

Thanks to the information revolution, more and more people rely on online news to
stay informed. Expressions such as “digital natives,” “netizens,” “webworms,” “Internet
geeks” are used to describe people who depend on Internet access for updating their
knowledge and information. Online news refers to a variety of formats to disseminate
information using Internet portals and digital presentation. These formats include news
delivered through online videos, flashes, sounds, images, and picture galleries, as well
as Web pages with hyperlinks. Such news can appear on a news organization’s web-
site, in local newspapers, or on community websites. Other sites include public forums,
individualized blogs, Weblogs, and other social media platforms. This article describes
the language of Web-page news presentation and how it links with the visual deliv-
ery of images, pictures, cartoons, galleries, and so on. Online news varies considerably
in style, political news and entertainment news being at the extremes, on a formality
continuum. After discussing online news in general, this article describes key stylistic
differences.

Characteristics of online news

Digitalization transformed traditional news industries into online news industries,

which in turn markedly changed how news is produced and consumed. The discourse
context of online news is characterized by changing production roles, increased
immediacy, multimedia content, interactivity, and individualization.

Changing production roles

Traditional news, in a narrow definition (which will be adopted here), refers to print
news such as newspapers and news magazines. It has respected a relatively clear-cut
division of labor in the production and conveyance of the news. Online news does
not. In traditional news production three main parties are distinguished (Bell, 1991).
The principal role in the print news industry is actually performed by the business
organization, and particularly by the owner of the newspaper. A second important
party is the news publishers, who take responsibility for the whole process of news
output. Traditional news is business and interest-driven, while online news is more
of an individually created product. The author of online news articles may have to
perform many tasks, which range from news-searching, editing, and designing to
promotion. Rather than having an editor who is responsible for vetting what will count
The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, First Edition.
Karen Tracy (General Editor), Cornelia Ilie and Todd Sandel (Associate Editors).
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118611463/wbielsi176
2 ON L I N E NE W S

as news, in online news self-selected authors write news articles and choose whatever
language style they prefer. Online authors take responsibility for the original lexical
choices, syntactic phrasing, and discourse organization of their stories. In traditional
news a third role is taken by subeditors or copy editors (or both). These persons are
expected to tailor the language and news content to cater to ideological and business
interests.
Distinctions among the three roles are blurred in online news production. With the
flourishing of blog, Weblog, 3G, “P2P,” “we media,” virtual communities, and other
new media, these new social networking sites have subverted the management of the
traditional news industry, changing how people consume their daily information. For
example, a person who is driving down the road and sees a multiple car pileup will
often take pictures and upload them with brief descriptions on a Weblog page. Here the
person is responsible for everything in this created news discourse. The person probably
has no economic interests and doesn’t have to submit what is written to editors, for
further revision and proofreading. The photograph of the accident, sometimes alone
and sometimes accompanied by commentary, is turned into a piece of online news in a
fraction of a minute.

Immediacy
In contrast to the traditional print news cycle, which has predictable and recurring time
windows for publishing, online news is characterized by a continuous publishing cycle
(Karlsson, 2012). In traditional print news, readers subscribe to a paper and have that
paper delivered to their door at assigned times, usually once a day, or perhaps only once
a week. Online news is much more immediate. Fixed publication cycles are replaced by
continuous updating, which follows an irregular pace that depends on what is occurring
with regard to a particular event. Especially during sporting events or the unfolding of a
crisis, readers expect immediate, up-to-the-minute coverage of an event. The potential
immediacy of online news has changed people’s news-reading habits, as they repeatedly
check back to online sources to see what is happening.

Multimedia
Compared with the restricted presentation options of traditional news, online news
has a rich variety of presentation choices. Hyperlinks are possible, users can make
comments, news stories may be moved up and down the front page, and multimedia
components such as Web TV may be added (Karlsson, 2012). The functionality of
the Web has changed so much that people refer to Web 2.0 to highlight the dramatic
change. Web 2.0 further breaks down the wall between news producers and readers
by allowing users to participate in the story’s production process and offer their
comments. Purely text-oriented news stories rarely appear in online news; instead Web
videos, sounds, flashes, and cartoons show up in hyperlinked pages. Apple.atnext.com
has even put forward a pioneer form of news-reporting known as “animated
news.” Animated news involves a written text accompanied by animated images
(Lee, 2012).
 ON L I N E NE W S 3

Interactivity
The possibility of much greater audience participation is a distinctive feature of online
news. By using convenient and immediate message-passing tools such as Twitter, Face-
book, LinkedIn, online news forum readers convey their opinions in a moment-to-
moment turn-taking style. In the traditional news era, the audience—that is, print
readers—had to mail letters and then wait several days for an authoritative reply, and
their letter might not be selected for future publication. Or, even if the format was a
radio news show, audience members could try their luck, phoning in in the hope that
they would be chosen to talk.
Online news media remove most of the regulation. Lee (2012) describes six signifi-
cant changes. The first is the inclusion of user-generated content, which allows users to
upload the information they see as newsworthy. Second, there has been an increase in
users’ ability to participate interactively in sites. Third comes what Lee calls “YouTubiza-
tion”: YouTubization is the reliance on video excerpts to tell a story. Online news allows
for instant reporting and provides minute-by-minute breaking news; this is the fourth
kind of change. The fifth change is related to the ability to establish connections and
links with social networking sites. Sharing and community networking are everywhere.
Finally, because of new communication technologies, online news permits customiza-
tion, offering tailor-made news services to individuals. These changes explain why “in-
teractivity” (Schultz, 2000) is now understood to go well beyond the mere feedback in
the form of polls, letters, or even phone-ins (Jucker, 2011).

Individualization
Traditional news consumption involves readers’ effort in searching their favorite arti-
cles from the entirety of a newspaper stream, which adds to their cognitive load in
processing information. Online news provides a solution to this troublesome turning
and tossing and reading for a particular piece of information. With online news read-
ers may select those sections of the newspaper they are interested in, and only receive
those parts (Jucker, 2003). This individualized service is practiced in the Los Angeles
Times, which enables readers to set up their own profile, in order to filter unnecessary
information and to ensure that they receive only those stories in which they would be
interested.

Discourse features of online news

Online news appears in a website’s home page in the form of headlines, which are short
and pithy. These headlines typically consist of no more than 10 relatively nontechni-
cal words that seek to represent the whole idea of a story. Headlines are designed for
easy understanding and to facilitate enjoyment. Syntactically, sentences in headlines use
active rather than passive voice, as active voice both saves words and produces a fresher,
timely feel. For the same reason, headlines also tend to use declarative sentences in the
present tense.
4 ON L I N E NE W S

Consider several headlines in Oneworld.net of April 21, 2014:

Security fears hold back relief work in quake-hit Pakistan

India to launch pension scheme for workers in Gulf
Increased fighting takes toll on healthcare on Afghanistan

The above headlines all contain 8–9 words, with no professional or technical expres-
sions. All follow a similar syntactic pattern: declarative sentence and active voice. Col-
loquial English verbs or verbal phrases are employed, such as “hold back” and “takes
toll on.”
In addition to conveying propositional meaning, conveying interpersonal meaning is
another important language function (Halliday, 1994). Internet news writers often use
images to convey their mood. Particularly in entertainment columns of online news,
blogs, or Weblogs, one is likely to see emoticons (e.g., smileys in graphics or graphical
emotion symbols). Common examples seen in entertainments news include:
O:-) = angel;
:#) = drunk;
:-C = real unhappy;
:-* = kiss on the cheek;
:-Q = smoking while talking;
:p = smiley with tongue hanging out.
The use of emoticons, comprised of symbols, numbers, and letters, adds a fresh, friendly,
and lively air to online news discourse. This also contributes to its interactive quality
and sense of immediacy. The pragmatic function of emoticons is to cue the illocutionary
force of a speech act; they also manage interpersonal rapport. According to Dresner and
Herring (2010), the three functions of emoticons are: (1) to express emotion through a
set of symbols that map directly into a common facial expression (e.g., happy or sad); (2)
to express subtlety of emotional meanings, mapped conventionally onto facial expres-
sion (e.g., a wink as indicating joking intent); and (3) as illocutionary force indicators
that weaken or strengthen what has been said (e.g., a smile that downgrades a complaint
to a simple assertion).
While emoticons work as social lubricators in bridging readers to online news
authors, hyperlinks take readers to a wider, more dispersed cyberspace. Hyperlinks
turn online news into multifaceted, multidimensional, and hierarchical text structures;
these links help readers jump to another Web page by simply clicking on keywords or
sentences in a news story. In addition, they also improve page scannability. The new
Web page that a hyperlink takes a viewer to is an extension of the original Web page,
but it adds background, including details about related news displayed as text, images,
sounds, videos, or some combination of these elements.
Hyperlinks contribute to the understood genre of online news discourse; most often
they include the following categories:
• headlines (compulsory);
• lead (compulsory);
• body (compulsory);
 ON L I N E NE W S 5

Figure 1 Stratifications of online news led by hyperlinks.

• background (optional);
• extensive reading (optional).
Consider the example in Figure 1:
The headline, “Ukraine alert as politician ‘killed’,” which is set in bold face, is imme-
diately followed by the lead, which is introduced by the key sentence “Ukraine’s acting
president orders the relaunch of military operations in the east after two men, one a
local politician, are found allegedly tortured to death.” Following these first two cate-
gories come several hyperlinks highlighted by the shadowed arrow symbol. Clicking on
the arrowed line will take readers to a fresh rich world of related news discourse. For
instance, when a reader clicks on the hyperlinked first arrowed line, “Footage shows
politician Watch” (Figure 2), that reader is taken to a page that contains a video clip
in the upper part and a brief description beneath. This page, in turn, has an addi-
tional hyperlink that says: “Read More,” which links to three additional channels. This
clickable subhyperlink with sharing technological channels (Facebook, Twitter) makes
online news a text with depth and breadth, but only if a reader wants it.
While the most common hyperlinks take you to videos, pictures, and texts, another
hyperlink will bring you to comments. The typical way in which this is to be done is that
after the news story there will be a clickable “comment” button. An example is given
in Figure 3: Underneath the lead part which reads “Russia says Ukraine broke accord
meant to ease tension” comes a hyperlink introduced by “141 comments” button.
The left part of the Web page in the New York Times of April 21 reads:

(1) Online news

Russia says Ukraine broke accord meant to ease tension

By Andrew E. Kramer
With Vice President Joseph R. Biden in Kiev on Monday, comments from
Russia’s foreign minister suggested that Moscow may be preparing
groundwork for a military intervention.
141comments
6 ON L I N E NE W S

Figure 2 “Footage shows politician Watch” video.

Figure 3 Online news appearance on the homepage with a comment hyperlink.

The news comments are shown in the respective hyperlink, one shows news discourse
content and the other displays comments, which are further classified into three groups:
all, readers’ picks, and NYT (New York Times’) picks.
The five characteristics of online news—changing production roles, immediacy,
multimedia, interactivity, and individualization—are instantiated by specific lexical
and syntactic features, emoticons, and hyperlinks. These characteristics have made
online news popular. All these characteristics and discourse features, working together,
make online news a specific digital genre that attracts a wider and wider scholarship.

Research directions

Online news has attracted scholars from a variety of disciplines, such as communica-
tion, journalism, linguistics, cultural studies, and information science, to name just a
 ON L I N E NE W S 7

few. Theoretical perspectives and research topics vary from one discipline to another.
In language and social interaction, studies often borrow analytic frameworks from each
other, and by so doing expose how discursive practices effect social change, as well as
the other way round.
Some promising directions for future research are: (1) comparing online news across
regions and countries, aiming to find similarities and, in terms of news content, news
sources, users, and modes of participation; (2) studying how Internet technology con-
tributes to diachronic differences of online news in terms of this format’s discourse
features, its production, and its practices of consumption; (3) using computer engi-
neering and linguistic tools to analyze the expression of sentiment and to engage in
opinion-mining that aims to determine users’ stance toward topics; and (4) consider-
ing how the idea of cohesion, usually understood as a text property, could be applied
to visual artifacts: What are the visual devices that enable strings of images and video
clips to be seen as connected?

SEE ALSO: Discourse Analysis; Multimodal Discourse Analysis; Print Media

Discourse; Social Media Discourse; Web-Mediated Communication

References

Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Dresner, E., & Herring, S. C. (2010). Functions of the non-verbal in CMC: Emoticons and illocu-
tionary force. Communication Theory, 20(3), 249–268. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01362.x
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). Introduction to functional grammar. London, UK: Edward Arnold.
Jucker, A. H. (2003). Mass media communication at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury: Dimensions of change. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 4(1), 129–148. doi: 10.1075/
jhp.4.1.07juc
Jucker, A. H. (2011). Mass media. In J.-O. Östman & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Pragmatics in practice
(pp. 248–263). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Karlsson, M. (2012). The online news cycle and the continuous alteration of crisis frames: A
Swedish case study on how the immediacy of online news affected the framing of the swine
flu epidemic. Journal of Organizational Transformation & Social Change, 9(3), 247–259. doi:
10.1386/jots.9.3.247_1
Lee, A. Y. L. (2012). Online news media in the Web 2.0 era: From boundary dissolu-
tion to journalistic transformation. Chinese Journal of Communication, 5(2), 210–226. doi:
10.1080/17544750.2012.664442
Schultz, T. (2000). Mass media and the concept of interactivity: An exploratory study of
online forums and reader email. Media, Culture & Society, 22(2), 205–221. doi: 10.1177/
016344300022002005

Further reading

Craig, D. A. (2010). Excellence in online journalism: Exploring current practices in an evolving

environment. London, UK: Sage.
 8 ON L I N E NE W S

Yus, F. (2011). Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context. Amsterdam,

Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Zhoumin Yuan is an associate professor of linguistics at Nanjing University of Posts

and Telecommunications, China. He is a China Pragmatics Association (CPrA) fellow.
His research interests include identity construction, interpersonal communication, and
cultural discourse studies.

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