Journalists arguing newsmaking decisions on the basis of anticipated audience uptake: a study of argumentation in the newsroom

This thesis sets out to explore journalists’ anticipatory reasoning on audience uptake, i.e. on the ways in which the audience will react to news. In order to reach this goal, I conduct an argumentative analysis of various types of newsroom activities. The analysis sheds light on journalists’ reasoning processes concerning audience uptake that lead them to broadcast/publish one certain news item instead of another, or on the way they decide to broadcast/publish a news item, starting from their anticipatory inferences. The adopted corpus consists of data gained from two distinct datasets; a) data from a previous project, Ideè Suisse, consisting of TV-journalism data in Swiss German and French, and b) print-journalism data in Italian collected at the newsroom of Corriere del Ticino, the main Italian-language newspaper in Switzerland, in the framework of the project Argumentation in newsmaking process and product. The data consist of videotaped editorial conferences, informal and formal journalist discourses, frame interviews, retrospective interviews, news products and source materials. The contextual and argumentative analysis aims at investigating the distinct aspects involved in the anticipation of audience uptake and at investigating the places of reflection (i.e. editorial conferences, informal meetings and retrospective interviews) wherein certain kinds of standpoints are at stake and particular aspects of audience uptake are anticipated. The anticipated uptake includes 1) anticipation of an emotive effect, of a news 2) anticipation of a cognitive effect, and 3) anticipation of a persuasion. I sketched a typology of journalists’ anticipation of audience uptake in terms of illocutionary, locutionary, and perlocutionary force. On the theoretical level I merge two theories that both aim at studying the human mind from a rational perspective. On the one hand, I use Castelfranchi’s theories on anticipation based on the cybernetic notion of goal, while, on the other h