Self-Reflexive Journalism

Using The Guardian as a case study, the volume draws on its Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies approach to explore how newspapers conceptualize the role of the media, good vs. bad journalism, professional values, community membership amongst their readers, and identity construction.

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This book develops a corpus-assisted approach to the study of self-reflexivity in journalism and examines the ways in which news workers and subsequently, news organizations, choose to promote an identity for themselves and the ideologies that accompany them. Using The Guardian as a case study, the volume draws on its Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to explore ways in which a newspaper can reflect upon itself, including how newspapers conceptualize the role of the media, how they define good vs. bad journalism, what they see as professional values, how they attempt to cement community membership amongst their readers, how they construct and project their overall identity and role as newspapers and also how they see their position within the larger community. A chapter on the book’s methodological framework reflects on critical aspects of CADS, including triangulation, objectivity and subjectivity, total accountability, and replicability. CADS methods are applied in the analysis chapters, with accompanying reflections on what we learn about the strengths and also maybe about some of the limitations of corpus methodology. A summarizing chapter ties these strands together to make the case for a CADS approach to journalism and media studies and look to the future at how the digital age has shaped the journalism landscape. With its focus in extending a CADS approach to other aspects of journalism scholarship, this volume is key reading for graduate students and researchers in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, media studies, and journalism studies.