{"id":21023,"date":"2018-02-27T09:53:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-27T08:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/?p=21023"},"modified":"2018-02-27T09:55:29","modified_gmt":"2018-02-27T08:55:29","slug":"cfp-whats-the-news-values-viruses-and-vectors-of-newsworthiness-en","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/en\/cfp-whats-the-news-values-viruses-and-vectors-of-newsworthiness-en\/","title":{"rendered":"CFP: What\u2019s (the) News? Values, Viruses and Vectors of Newsworthiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

13-14 December 2018<\/strong>
\n Third biennial conference of the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies (BIJU)<\/strong>
\n Department of Applied Linguistics<\/strong>
\n Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Deadline for proposals:<\/strong> 30 June 2018<\/p>\n

Plenary speakers<\/strong>
\nMonika Bednarek (University of Sydney, Australia)
\nTony Harcup (University of Sheffield, UK)<\/p>\n

Steered by what Kovach & Rosenstiel describe as our \u2018awareness instinct\u2019, exchanging \u2018news\u2019 fulfills basic human needs for information, orientation, and connection. The entanglement of \u2018news\u2019, understood as recent and current public information, and the development of journalism (as a profession), renders the question what \u2018is\u2019 or \u2018becomes\u2019 news highly relevant for the study of journalism. One particularly influential approach to \u2018newsworthiness\u2019 in journalism studies emerged from Galtung and Ruge\u2019s 1965 seminal study on \u2018news values\u2019 in (foreign) news reporting. The core question of this study was which criteria journalists apply in the news selection process. The authors contend that (negative) events having to do with conflict, elites or change in the daily lives or the immediate environment of the audience are likely to become news. Especially if they have some magnitude and if they are recent, unexpected and\/or if they can be linked to individ
\nual people. Since then, numerous scholars taking sociological or critical cultural approaches to \u2018news values\u2019, and selection and journalistic routines in general, have revisited their ideas, and refined and complemented them.
\nThese insights have been applicable to a lesser or greater extent throughout the whole history of journalism, yet, the digital era and the advent of social media more specifically have altered vectors \u2013 understood both as agents and carriers \u2013 of newsworthiness significantly, reshaping how \u2018news\u2019 is conceived, the way it comes about and is exchanged. Within a networked, globalized environment, the range of sources that are available to journalists or that are able to trigger \u2018news\u2019 on a day-to-day basis has expanded considerably, while a plethora of newcomers (e.g. citizen journalists, alternative, grassroots and partisan media outlets) in or at the margins of the journalistic field challenge traditional conceptions of \u2018newsworthiness\u2019, as well as the relationship between \u2018journalism\u2019 and \u2018news\u2019 per se (e.g. in \u2018slow journalism\u2019 and \u2018constructive journalism\u2019 movements). Even if the position of these newcomers along traditional news media\u2019s status as
\nprimary definers of \u2018the news\u2019 may still be subject to debate, it is hard to deny the impact of digitization and social media on contemporary audiences\u2019 daily \u2018news diet\u2019.
\nAmongst others, search engines, (automated) news aggregators, and social media platforms, and their underlying algorithms, have become key to understanding how news emerges and circulates nowadays. Social media allow to register which stories are clicked, liked or shared most and thus to examine which topics and approaches raise the highest interest of the audience. Journalists are expected to develop a feeling for \u2018shareability\u2019 and to produce texts and visuals which will \u2018go viral\u2019. The focus in the selection process seems to have shifted ever more from what journalists deemed fit to publish towards what the audience is expected to appreciate most. Moreover, as clicks, likes and shares are monitored automatically, news stories which receive the most attention of readers are moved up higher in the news flow, so that they are picked up even more often. This presentation process often happens without human intervention, thus leaving the selection entirely to the appreciation
\nof the audience. Furthermore, these developments have also led to highly customized news packages \u2013 \u2018me media\u2019 \u2013 and the related issues of the \u2018filter bubble\u2019 and \u2018echo chamber\u2019.
\nHowever, it is still the journalist (or is it the \u2018news worker\u2019) who decides what shape the story will take and which aspects will be accentuated. The topic of news values can therefore also be approached from a linguistic\/discursive side. The main question then is how news workers construct an event as interesting or relevant, i.e. how they use language to make certain events newsworthy, especially on the internet media platforms. And taking into consideration the importance of visual resources on these platforms, an analysis of verbal text will in many cases have to be replaced by or complemented with a multimodal analysis.
\nWe invite participants to engage in a critical discussion of newsworthiness. Possible questions which can be addressed are: are there topics which are newsworthy by nature, which elements arouse most interest in human psyche, which stories and\/or sources do journalists and their audience find worth sharing, how do news values vary between media types and news beats, how can journalists or news workers construct issues or events as interesting, what is the relation between newsworthiness and publishing platforms.
\nInspirational literature:
\nBednarek, Monika & Helen Caple (2017). The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create ‘Newsworthiness’. New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Harcup, Tony & Deirdre O’Neill (2017). What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism Studies, 18 (12). pp. 1470-1488.<\/p>\n

We welcome submissions from all relevant disciplinary backgrounds approaching topics including but certainly not limited to:
\n\u2022 News values in the selection of news
\n\u2022 News values in the production of news
\n\u2022 The linguistic or multimodal construction of an event as newsworthy
\n\u2022 The relation between publishing platforms and newsworthiness
\n\u2022 What makes news \u2018go viral\u2019
\n\u2022 Algorithms and automation in the presentation of news
\n\u2022 Methodological approaches to the study of newsworthiness<\/p>\n

We welcome both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and analyses at process, product\/text, and\/or audience level.
\nAll papers will be published (after the authors\u2019 consent) in the electronic proceedings of the conference and we are planning to publish a selection of the papers in a volume and\/or a special issue.
\nJunior researchers are warmly invited to participate.
\nThe venue for the conference will be the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (https:\/\/www.naturalsciences.be\/en) Vautierstraat\/Rue Vautier 29, 1000 Brussels, near the Brussels-Luxembourg station, a lively neighbourhood with lots of hotels and restaurants.<\/p>\n

Conference fee<\/strong> (including pre-conference reception, lunch, coffee):
\n\u20ac 150 (regular participants), \u20ac 75 (PhD students).
\nDinner will be organized on Friday 14 December and charged separately.<\/p>\n

Please send a proposal of no more than 300 words<\/strong> (excluding selected references) together with your affiliation and a short biography (c. 100 words) to whatnews@vub.be by 30 June 2018. Decisions will be announced by 15 August. Questions about any aspect of the conference should be addressed to whatnews@vub.be.
\nFor updates on the practical organization, please check our website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13-14 December 2018 Third biennial conference of the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies (BIJU) Department of Applied Linguistics Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium Deadline for … CFP: What\u2019s (the) News? Values, Viruses and Vectors of Newsworthiness<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[523,1013],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-call-for-papers-en","category-linguistics-belgium","bnm-entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21023"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21093,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21023\/revisions\/21093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uclouvain.be\/bkl-cbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}