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Spatial Aspects of Personification in International News

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Quantitative Semiotic Analysis

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis ((LECTMORPH))

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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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Notes

  1. 1.

    Likewise, several scholars had comparable findings in other national contexts: Boczkowski and de Santos (2007) for Argentina, Dagiral and Parasie (2012) for Germany and Cottle and Ashton (1999) for the UK.

  2. 2.

    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.

  3. 3.

    Incidentally, they were not the first scholars to work on this topic. In 1949, Wilbur Schramm had already highlighted the importance of personification: “the case of self-identification with the story is powerfully influential on the probability that a reader will select the story” (1949, 268).

  4. 4.

    ANR Corpus GEOMEDIA (2013–2016) http://geomedia.hypotheses.org/ (accessed 14 November, 2016).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Paris Nanterre, Nanterre, France

    Marta Severo

  2. CNRS, Paris, France

    Laurent Beauguitte

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  1. Marta Severo
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  2. Laurent Beauguitte
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Correspondence to Marta Severo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CREM, University of Lorraine, Metz, France

    Dario Compagno

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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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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61593-6_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61592-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61593-6

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