Journalistic news writing: A case study on revisions of content and form

Abstract

News products provide a major part of the foundation of what we know about the world in which we live. However, we lack empirical knowledge about the process of writing news texts, e. g. knowledge about the choices made by journalists as to what to communicate and how to communicate it. This paper aims to contribute to filling this research gap by reporting on a case study of some of the decisions journalists make as regards content and linguistic form when composing news articles. More specifically, the study investigated the revision practices of three journalists during text production at a Spanish newspaper, as these revisions yield insights into the progression of the text and thus contribute to our understanding of how journalists work with the content and linguistic form of a text. Results indicate that journalists’ revisions are related to form markedly more often than to content (approx. three to four times more often). Moreover, revision type (e. g. addition, omission and substitution) and effect on the text (content or form) seem to suggest two writing phases serving different overall purposes; producing (more) text for the newspaper article in the first phase and evaluating, and especially reducing the length of the article in the second phase.