Abstract
Together with politics, international news is often considered to be one of the most prestigious fields of journalism. However, making international news attractive is increasingly difficult. Today, one of the main strategies employed by journalists consists in mentioning individuals in the news. The reader is supposed to identify with the mentioned individual(s), and the story is expected to be more successful as a consequence. This paper investigates the interest of using quali-quantitative content analysis to study the semiotics of international news. We analyse six daily newspapers from three developed countries and examine three complementary aspects of the relation between individuals and international news: the level of personification, the type of individual mentioned and the geographical scale to which individuals is connected.
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In this paper, we focus only on the strategies of personification employed by journalists without considering the corresponding practices of identification carried out by readers. It is important to note that no statistical data are provided about the use of newspapers’ RSS feeds. The only way to study identification would be to carry out an empirical study with a sample of readers for each considered newspaper. This could an interesting subject for further research.
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ANR Corpus GEOMEDIA (2013–2016) http://geomedia.hypotheses.org/ (accessed 14 November, 2016).
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Severo, M., Beauguitte, L. (2018). Spatial Aspects of Personification in International News. In: Compagno, D. (eds) Quantitative Semiotic Analysis. Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61593-6_9
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