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This article shows that readers' letters were selected and edited in late 19th-century Finnish newspapers for a variety of reasons. The criteria for selection and editing fit the four rules identified by professor of journalism Karin Wahl-Jorgensen for the selection of readers' letters in modern newspapers and it also demonstrates the 1890s newspapers' role as gatekeepers and the continuing professionalization of journalists. The editors considered the selection and editing of readers' letters demanding and frustrating, but they also saw themselves as men of principle, the defenders of the free word. The research sources include the correspondence columns and the editors' writing instructions to the readers in the 1890s press of the Grand Duchy of Finland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract available.

This article examines the reception of popular serial narratives. Starting from the assumption that this reception presents both a challenge (how to study the vast and heterogeneous readerly engagement with these texts?) and a chance (readers of such texts tend to comment profusely about the reception process), we identify the paratext as a privileged space of readerly communication on, and serial engagement with, popular storytelling. We develop the concept of "paratextual negotiation" as a means of understanding letter columns and fan forums as (now mostly) digital epitexts that shape the evolution of particularly popular—widely noticed, commercially successful, long-running—narratives, with a focus on the German science fiction pulp novel series Perry Rhodan (1961–) and additional thoughts on the US American comic book superhero Captain America (1941–). Taking the quantitative-empirical metrics of attention measurement and their public display seriously by identifying and close-reading the most popular forum threads and the most broadly recognized commentary about these narratives, we argue that the participatory element of popular culture can be reconstructed in the interplay between series text and serial paratext and can be described as a force in serial evolution that thrives on a combination of variation and redundancy and of selection and adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world's fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world's second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by people in Pakistan, although the only two official languages are Urdu and English. After its Independence from the British colonial rule in 1947, it took much deliberation for the country to make a shift from its monolingual Urdu orientation to a multilingual language policy in education in 2009. This entailed a shift from the dominant Urdu language policy for the masses (and English exclusively reserved for elite institutions), to a gradual and promising change that responded to the increasing social demand for English and for including regional languages in the curriculum. Yet English and Urdu dominate the present policy and exclude regional non-dominant languages in education that themselves are dynamic and unstable, and restructured continually due to the de facto multilingual and plurilingual repertoire of the country. Using Bourdieu's (Outline of a theory of practice Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977a, The economics of linguistic exchanges. Soc Sci Inform 16:645–668, 1977b, The genesis of the concepts of habitus and field. Sociocriticism 2:11–24 1985, Language and symbolic power Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991) conceptualization of habitus, this study analyzes letters to the editor published between 2002–2009 and 2018–2020 in a leading English daily of Pakistan. The analysis unveils the linguistic dispositions that are discussed in the letters and their restructuring through market forces, demonstrating a continuity between the language policy discourse and public aspirations. The findings also indicate the ambivalences towards Urdu and English in relation to nationalistic ideologies, modernity and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1915 the echo of the Ottoman massacres of the Christian minorities living within the borders of the Empire reached the international press at once. The Times functioned as an English-language cross-cultural referential platform for its international readership, and regularly published letters to the editor reporting on the political and humanitarian events involving the Armenians. Those letters to the editor were written in English by notable authors from different national backgrounds and political appointments, including also Armenian notables and delegates. A corpus of letters to the editor of The Times was collected for the purpose of this study and examined through a corpus-driven and a corpus-assisted approach. This article focuses on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of recurring language of evaluation related to discursive news value analysis, with a specific focus on how the parameter of “emotivity” is expressed through the language used in the letters. This study attempts to explain the linguistic strategies through which a cross-cultural intersubjective connection with the readership of The Times was created, and it also attempts to clarify the textual strategies implemented in the letters to the editor of The Times to keep the Armenian events newsworthy.

Selected by newspaper editors to keep specific topics current in the news, Letters to the Editor (LTE) have long intertwined with historical events, among which the twentieth century Armenian genocide. At that time international humanitarian workers and political personalities made appeals to the reading public and expressed their indignation for the violence perpetrated to Armenian civilians. Rarely, however, have LTE been studied for their linguistic features. Since they were to meet the ideological agenda of the newspaper's readers of the time, which recurrent linguistic strategies were used to achieve this? This contribution is part of a more extensive research combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to study the representation of the Armenian genocide in historical news discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Letters to the editor are argued to be a staple of the public sphere and, by providing regular citizens with a platform to voice their concerns to a large audience, a central democratic function of a liberal press. However, the actual weight given by the press to citizens' deliberation on issues and the contribution of these letters in terms of content is still little researched, and historical and comparative studies are largely absent. In this article we offer a case study of letters on the immigration issue in six Scandinavian newspapers (N = 1065). Charting their volume and content using content analysis and comparing them to the more elite-dominated columns and regular news items (N = 3264), we identify major historical and national variations in the salience of the issue and the weight given the vox populi in the press. Constructing a discursive space of immigration letters using multiple correspondence analysis and subsequent clustering into seven categories of letters, we identify a historical movement towards more problematizing and cultural discourse, strongest in the Danish newspapers. We also identify Sweden as a particularly interesting case, with fewer letters and less difference between letters and other newspaper content, for which we suggest some hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colombia’s long-awaited emergence from armed conflict seems to be under way, at the same time as a passionate green movement is emerging. We trace the use of emotion in newspaper letters to the editor that address environmental matters concerning the Magdalena River in relation to ecology, the conflict, and cultural identity.

Colombia’s long-awaited emergence from armed conflict seems to be under way, at the same time as a passionate green movement is emerging. We trace the use of emotion in newspaper letters to the editor that address environmental matters concerning the Magdalena River in relation to ecology, the conflict, and cultural identity.

Letters to the editor (LTE) are significant when studying newspapers’ ideological stance on a specific news event. They offer a privileged point of view because they are selected to match the newspaper’s agenda, to provide a timely comment on significant news events, and to keep specific events “in the news”. The massacre of the Christian minorities throughout the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923 was reported in LTE of major international newspapers. A quantitative and qualitative linguistic examination will study the representation of the conflict between victims and perpetrators of the genocide in a corpus of LTE published in The Times between 1914 and 1926.

This issue introduces Marketing Letters' data policy, formulated by our data policy board, comprised of Dina Mayzlin, Darren Dahl, Anirban Mukhopadhyay, and Joachim Vosgerau (Chair). In line with the vision of the founding editors of Marketing Letters to publish interesting findings that are not wrong, this policy is designed to guard against "being wrong," without precluding publication of interesting research. It is designed to be (a) simple, i.e., easy to understand and execute; (b) effective, i.e., serving to improve integrity of science and the journal; and (c) protective, i.e., defining the rights, expectations, and responsibilities of all authors and readers of Marketing Letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the reception of popular serial narratives. Starting from the assumption that this reception presents both a challenge (how to study the vast and heterogeneous readerly engagement with these texts?) and a chance (readers of such texts tend to comment profusely about the reception process), we identify the paratext as a privileged space of readerly communication on, and serial engagement with, popular storytelling. We develop the concept of “paratextual negotiation” as a means of understanding letter columns and fan forums as (now mostly) digital epitexts that shape the evolution of particularly popular—widely noticed, commercially successful, long-running—narratives, with a focus on the German science fiction pulp novel series Perry Rhodan (1961–) and additional thoughts on the US American comic book superhero Captain America (1941–). Taking the quantitative-empirical metrics of attention measurement and their public display seriously by identifying and close-reading the most popular forum threads and the most broadly recognized commentary about these narratives, we argue that the participatory element of popular culture can be reconstructed in the interplay between series text and serial paratext and can be described as a force in serial evolution that thrives on a combination of variation and redundancy and of selection and adaptation.

The referendum on Britain's membership of the EU gave citizens the final say on one of the most controversial political issues in modern Britain, crossing social classes, traditional political cleavages, and political parties. In an attempt to examine how the public made sense of Brexit and its potential consequences, we analyse all letters to the editor discussing Brexit or the campaign published in British daily national newspapers in the two months before the referendum. Through a content analysis of 1419 letters, we examine the main themes, capturing the key concerns, criticisms, and political aspirations expressed by citizens. Leave messages largely dominated in Leave newspapers, whereas a wider range of voices were represented in Remain titles. Leave voices, therefore, resonated more strongly throughout the letters. Our analysis points to changing forms of public debate: in a debate dominated by negativity, readers mainly argued against leaving or remaining in the EU, as opposed to arguing in favour of these options, to the extent that some readers expressed frustration with the negativity of the campaigns, and of media coverage. Ultimately, this study tentatively explores whether these fora constituted arenas for debate, or off-line echo-chambers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Letters to the editor (LTE) are significant when studying newspapers' ideological stance on a specific news event. They offer a privileged point of view because they are selected to match the newspaper's agenda, to provide a timely comment on significant news events, and to keep specific events "in the news". The massacre of the Christian minorities throughout the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923 was reported in LTE of major international newspapers. A quantitative and qualitative linguistic examination will study the representation of the conflict between victims and perpetrators of the genocide in a corpus of LTE published in The Times between 1914 and 1926. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short communications are an integral part of academic journal publishing since they serve as a forum for scholarly debate on recently published journal articles. Their prestige and popularity, however, have been declining in the present academic setting. In this short note, we offer several reasons for this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark’s largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet. A discourse analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These processes took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse. At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism and user-generated content.

The Armenian genocide of 1915-1923 (Dadrian 2003) had a massive international news coverage at the time of the events and in the decades that followed (Peltekian 2013; Elayyadi 2017), but few linguistic studies have examined its news discourse. None, so far, has analysed the letters to the editor commenting on the genocide and on the Armenian question at large. Letters to the editor, intended as specific news discourse, rarely have been targeted by linguistic studies (see Chovanec 2012; Romova and Hetet 2012; Pounds 2005; 2006). A corpus of 186 letters to the editor of The Times, published between 1914 and 1926, was collected to examine the linguistic strategies used to construct the newsworthiness of the Armenian genocide through the news value of timeliness. Timeliness is here intended as the recency in time of the events that are commented in the letters to the editor. The concepts of evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000), of evaluative parameters in media discourse (Bednarek and Caple 2019) and of semantic prosody (Partington 2004; Sinclair 2004) are applied to most recurrent lexical items related to timeliness (recent, new, last), analysing their concordances and collocates, thus combining discourse analysis with a corpus-driven approach (Tognini-Bonelli 2001; Sinclair 1996, 2004). The findings show the linguistic features of the semantic prosody of timeliness in the corpus.

The relevance of letters to the editor (LTE) calls for more research on the linguistic construction of their newsworthiness, particularly when letters are used to foster debate on controversial issues. The connection between newsworthiness and the language of evaluation has been studied quite extensively using corpora (Hunston 2011; Bednarek - Caple 2019). However, limited research has been performed on corpora of LTE to investigate their linguistic features (Pounds 2006; Romova - Hetet 2012). A small but significant corpus of LTE of The Times written between 1914 and 1926 on the Armenian question was selected to investigate their evaluative patterns of newsworthiness. Word frequency, collocational patterns, clusters of evaluative lexico-grammatical items and their semantic connotation were examined, also in relation to elements of the grammar of modality, with a specific focus on the evaluative adjective "possible" in its attributive and predicative uses. Understanding the linguistic strategies that contributed to keep alive the debate on those events provides further insights into the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This survey aimed to review how scientific articles were reported and to describe the types of statistical tests that had been recently and commonly used in The International Journal of Prosthodontics. Materials and Methods: All 174 articles published in 2012 and 2013 were hand-searched to identify scientific articles (n = 151) and those using at least one statistical test to explore results (n = 111). Editorials, letters, comments, erratum, and award proceedings were excluded. The number and type of statistical tests used within articles were collated, and the 10 commonly used methods were identified and described. Results: Of the 151 scientific articles, 76% (n = 111) used at least one statistical test and 24% (n = 40) used qualitative methods. Up to 10 tests were used per article, with 237 in total, of which 36 were unique. The 10 most commonly used tests were analysis of variance (ANOVA; n = 34), survival analyses (n = 29), Student t test (n = 19), chi-square (n = 19), Mann-Whitney U (n = 14), logistic regression (n = 13), Wilcoxon signed rank (n = 12), Fisher exact (n = 11), log-rank (n = 10), and Cox proportional hazards (n = 8), and they accounted for 71% (n = 169) of all tests used. Conclusions: The vast majority of articles published in recent years in The International Journal of Prosthodontics employed statistical analyses. Across 2 years, nearly 250 tests were completed, including 36 unique tests. Statistical test use was common but diverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]