The thirteen chapters in this volume cover corpora of early news-papers and pamphlets, present-day news stories and commentaries, TV talk shows and commercials as well as internet presentations. The studies focus on the wide range of text types in 18th century newspapers and the interpersonal strategies of pamphlets; they pursue the development of the persuasive potential of headlines and advertisements right down to the sophisticated postmodernist and multilingual examples of today. Other topics are the definition and structure of news stories and commentaries, the interpersonal and multi-modal aspects of talkshows, and more radically, the questioning of the journalist’s role in the age of the internet. Generally the stress is on the attention-getting side of media texts rather than on the manipulative qualities investigated by critical discourse analysis.