The study explores aspects of how British broadsheet news journalists produce news stories. It seeks to understand news texts in terms of their production within the journalistic community so as to develop a critique and investigate alternative ways of writing. Chapter one situates the study against the author's personal concerns as a practising journalist. Chapter two draws on a Foucauldian model of discourse, Etienne Wenger's theorisation of communities of practice and journalists' own understanding of their writing in terms of style to describe the situated knowledge within which news texts are produced. Chapter three places the study historically, arguing that 'modern' news discourse as a mode of practice, writing and understanding the world developed between 1880 and 1930 in Britain. Following chapters analyse this knowledge of writing in a number of ways. Chapter four uses journalists' memoirs and other metatexts to investigate how news texts make sense from within the practice. Chapter five reads the work of students on a postgraduate journalism course to explore what needs to be learnt in order to gain competence in newswriting. Chapters six and seven analyse news texts from British broadsheets in terms of news writing practice. Chapter six suggests that a number of aspects of news texts can be accounted for in terms of journalists' search for capital within their community, and chapter seven that news texts are constructed with only loose coherence. Chapter eight draws these points together in an exploration of the potential of online journalism to offer ways of writing outside or on the edge of this practice.

Master of Science / Department of Journalism and Mass Communications / Tom Hallaq / Traditionally, men have been the primary face and voice of live broadcasting. Limited research has compared Designated Market Areas by news content. This study compared and analyzed gender representations between large and small market news programs in the Northwest region of the United States. Hard news stories are those which audiences expect to be included in a newscast and are more likely time-sensitive. Soft stories, on the other hand, are those known to be not as crucial or time-sensitive as hard stories. The purpose of this study was to examine two major topics: (1) gender representation as news anchors and reporters, and (2) gender representation in types of stories covered. Data of gender representation was compared and analyzed between a large and small news market. Notable differences and similarities between both markets were revealed. This study found female news reporters present 16% more hard stories than male reporters even when females were underrepresented as overall news talent compared to male news talent. Males represented 55% of news talent compared to females at 45% of news talent. Male anchors also presented more news stories as overall news talent, indicating visible gender inequality in the presentation of news stories. Another important purpose of this study was to introduce a preliminary study by comparing and analyzing gender representation data by television market size. An important difference found regarding news anchors, was the large market sample more equally represented both males and females as anchors, whereas the small market sample did not. The data revealed a 56% disparity by exhibiting males 78% of the time and females only 22% of the time in the small news market. Both markets also displayed significant differences in the total count of news anchors, reporters, and news content.

The way digital news are being created today is very different from traditional printed methods. The digital news format has possibilities that printed versions do not have. For example, they can use animations, video, audio, and interactivity, referred to with a collective name as rich content in this study. The problem is that there is little knowledge about rich content, how it is being used and the reasons for using it. By interviewing journalists and content creators, this study aims to answer the following questions: How can rich content help convey a digital news story to the reader in a more engaging way than traditional methods? How can rich content help widen the audience of digital news stories? Through semi-structured interviews, the author explored how rich content is used, and how people think when creating it. Ten employees at the media house Schibsted, all working at different Norwegian newspapers, participated to this study. The results indicate that rich content in digital news articles can help convey a news story’s main points by delivering complex things in an easy and understandable way. As a result, rich content seems to encourage more readers to finish the whole article. This study has also found that rich content can be used to widen the audience, since it can make the promotion of an article more interesting and make more people eager to share the article on their own social media accounts. Furthermore, targeting news articles towards different user groups could help widen the audience even further. Strengths and weaknesses are discussed, and the future work section show potential in further investigating how different user groups are affected by rich content, and what types of articles can benefit the most by using rich content. / Det sätt som digitala nyhetsartiklar skapas på idag skiljer sig mycket från traditionella tryckta metoder. Det digitala nyhets formatet har möjligheter som tryckta versioner inte har. Till exempel, användning av animationer, video, ljud och interaktivitet, som med ett kollektivt namn kallas för rich content i denna studie. Problemet är att det finns begränsad kunskap om rich content, hur det används och anledningarna till användning av det. Genom intervjuer med journalister och innehållsskapare har denna studies mål varit att besvara följande frågeställningar: Hur kan rich content hjälpa till att förmedla digitala nyheter till läsaren på ett mer engagerande sätt än traditionella metoder? Hur kan rich content hjälpa till med att bredda publiken av digitala nyheter? Genom semistrukturerade intervjuer undersökte författaren hur rich content används och hur de anställda tänker under skapandet av rich content. Tio anställda på mediehuset Schibsted, som alla arbetar vid olika norska tidningar, deltog till denna studie. Resultaten indikerar att rich content i digitala nyhetsartiklar kan hjälpa att förmedla en nyhets huvudbudskap genom att leverera komplexa saker på ett enkelt och mer förståeligt sätt. Resultaten visar på att rich content verkar uppmuntra fler läsare till att läsa klart hela artikeln. Denna studies resultat visar även att rich content kan användas till att bredda publiken, eftersom det kan göra marknadsföringen av en artikeln mer intressant och får fler människor att vilja dela artikeln på sina egna sociala medier. Vidare kan riktade nyhetsartiklar mot olika användargrupper hjälpa till att bredda publiken ytterligare. Eventuella styrkor och svagheter diskuteras och stycket framtida arbete visar potentiell vidare undersökning gällande hur olika användargrupper påverkas av rich content och vad för typ av artiklar som kan dra störst fördel av användning av rich content.