Thursday 5 June, 16.45-17.45

Prof. Birte Bös (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

“Of hopes and struggles – Newsmakers’ metadiscourse at the dawn of the newspaper age”

This talk will deal with instances of metadiscourse in the first and last issues of (often short-lived) newspapers in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which provide interesting comments regarding the newsmakers’ motivations and their (not always successful) struggles to find and defend their places in the newspaper market. These comments often include discussions of style, content and envisaged readerships of their papers.

Friday 6 June, 15.45-16.45

Prof. Martin Conboy (University of Sheffield, UK)

“British popular newspaper traditions: From the 19th century to the first tabloid”

This presentation will consider the strategies of British popular newspapers in an attempt to construct a national popular voice from the 19th century to the 1930s when the first British tabloid, The Daily Mirror, was relaunched. It was designed to appeal specifically to what had been identified by marketing experts as a gap and aimed at a non-political, working class audience as a profit-making solution for a failing newspaper. Its articulation of an idealized voice and a community of readers, best demonstrated in its early use of readers’ letters, ensured that it became the template, and later target, for all subsequent tabloid newspapers in Britain.

Saturday 14.30-15.30

Prof. Roberta Facchinetti (University of Verona, Italy)

“The birth and development of multimodality in news reporting”

This talk will provide an overview of the birth and development of multimodality in news reporting, from the first pictures published in newspapers in the 1840s to the emergence of photojournalism in the 1920s, and finally present-day online ‘news packages’. Special attention will be dedicated to subjectivity and interpretation of print and online news texts.