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In:Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse
Edited by Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 5] 2015
► pp. 23–52

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Conceptualisations, sources and agents of news

Key terms as signposts of changing journalistic practices

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Published online: 24 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.5.02bos
This paper investigates six sets of key terms relating to the conceptualisation, transmission and production, and the agents of news. Based on an analysis of the Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC), which spans three centuries of news writing, the quantitative and qualitative developments of these news-related terms are explored. Their metadiscursive usage correlates with changing journalistic practices and sheds light on turning points in news writing. One such defining moment is located at the turn of the 19th/20th century, when changes were introduced which paved the way for modern journalism as we know it today.
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