Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied LinguisticsVol. 20:2 (1997) ► pp.95–118
The structure of the accident news story
This paper presents an overview of 150 years of accident news writing as presented in the Sydney Morning Herald, with the aim of uncovering the genesis of the ‘hard’ news story, and locating the practice of news writing in its historical context. This overview will serve as a grounding for a discussion of current news writing practices in general. Parallels will be suggested between the nature of accident stories on the one hand, and the role and concerns of the print media in modern industrial society on the other. The paper concludes that ‘hard’ news writing is concerned with the recontextualization of socially ‘destabilizing’ events (Iedema, Feez and White 1995), as well as with the rendering relevant of these recontextualizations to a diffuse and generalised media audience.
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