Search results for "New Scientist"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Popularity-driven science journalism and climate change: A critical discourse analysis of the unsaid
2018
Abstract This study traces popularity-driven coverage of climate change in New Scientist with the special aim of identifying which aspects of the issue have been backgrounded. Unlike institutional communication or quality press coverage of climate change, commercial science journalism has received less attention with respect to how it frames the crisis. Assuming that the construction of newsworthiness in popular science journalism requires eliminating, or at least obscuring, some alienating information, the study identifies prevalent frames, news values and discursive strategies in the outlet’s most-read online articles on climate change (2013–2015). With the official statement of the World…
Journalistic practices of science popularization in the context of users’ agenda: A case study of „New Scientist”
2017
The article includes a discussion of two models which describe contemporary communication processes in journalism: agenda-setting and news value, indicating the need to expand their research tools to include qualitative methods, and merging the analyses of the reception and the message. It also includes indications as to the possibility, or even the social relevance, of the methods for applying those research perspectives to analysing journalism popularising science. Later, I present the results of an analysis of the content of a sample of 500 most read popular science texts available on the New Scientist website. I demonstrate which thematic areas were valued by the readers, and what value…
Stylistic analysis of headlines in science journalism: A case study ofNew Scientist
2016
This article explores science journalism in the context of the media competition for readers’ attention. It offers a qualitative stylistic perspective on how popular journalism colonizes science communication. It examines a sample of 400 headlines collected over the period of 15 months from the ranking of five ‘most-read’ articles on the website of the international magazine New Scientist. Dominant lexical properties of the sample are first identified through frequency and keyness survey and then analysed qualitatively from the perspective of the stylistic projection of newsworthiness. The analysis illustrates various degrees of stylistic ‘hybridity’ in online popularization of scientific r…
Communicating environmental science beyond academia: Stylistic patterns of newsworthiness in popular science journalism
2017
Science communication in online media is a discursive domain where science-related content is often expressed through styles characteristic of popular journalism. This article aims to characterize some dominant stylistic patterns in magazine articles devoted to environmental issues by identifying the devices used to enhance newsworthiness, given the fact that for some readers environmental topics may no longer seem engaging. The analytic perspective is an adaptation of the newsworthiness framework that has been applied in news discourse studies. The material is a sample of the 38 most-read environment-oriented articles in the online version of the international science magazine New Scientis…
Framing disease, ageing and death in popular science journalism
2016
This paper characterizes the dominant frames in popular science-oriented reports devoted to disease, ageing and death. In popular science journalism, framing often consists in the discursive construction of newsworthiness, i.e., foregrounding features of events/issues considered by science editors to be relevant or attractive for audiences, despite the alienating nature of some types of news. A sample of most-read health-related articles from New Scientist (2013-2015) is subjected to content analysis, keyness analysis, concordance analysis and news value analysis to demonstrate how bioscience tends to be framed through consistent and strategic linguistic choices. The analyses reveal that mo…