Journalistic Articles: Features & Language
Journalistic Articles
Introduction: The Journalistic Language
Journalism responds to the information demands of man. To meet this demand, it uses mass media or means of mass communication. There are three main functions of journalism: to inform, educate, and entertain.
Information must be reliable, firsthand, verified, directly exposed, sufficient, and objective.
Education: Daily news creates a state of opinion by providing readers with information, contrasting ideological or evaluative elements, ideas, and arguments.
Entertainment takes a back seat in the press, usually represented in hobbies and Sunday supplements.
Journalistic articles are the result of a communication process with characteristic features that differentiate them from other texts:
- The issuer’s business is journalism: a known journalist, a press agency, a regular contributor, etc.
- The receiver is anonymous, multiple, and heterogeneous (diverse culture, with different skills), has a passive role in the process, and cannot verify the authenticity of the transmitted data.
- Different codes are used: linguistic, typographic (different size and color of print), and iconic (pictures, graphs, maps, etc.). All these codes are involved in the assessment of the information. The linguistic code is used at different levels or registers: colloquial, literary, etc., depending on the genre.
- The message comprises both the specific content of information and the final aim: to persuade, inform, or form a state of mind.
- The situational context consists of all the circumstances connected with the theme: location, time of occurrence, leading concerns, importance, and the impact of the fact.
Mass Media has been a huge advance in disseminating culture and information and the possibility of participation in public life. Still, its conception has some negative aspects:
- The deformation of its contents, usually simplifying to suit an average audience.
- Forgetting that the receivers are not a homogeneous mass but show individualized cultural peculiarities.
- Its conservative nature and lack of critical thinking result from simply transmitting cultural events and experienced higher levels.
- Submission to the principles of consumer society.
- The extraordinary power (The Fourth Estate) as an instrument to impose an ideology.
- The passive nature of the reception and the impossibility of dialogue due to one-way communication.
Specific Linguistic Features of Articles
Errors, Mistakes, and Inappropriate Expressions: The most common are:
§ Improper use of vocabulary: watch instead of see, assaults instead of attacks, to prioritize instead of giving priority. § Inappropriate and excessive use of neologisms, foreign words, and barbarism: light, leasing, holding, apartheid, the topic, personación instead of appearance, etc. § Euphemisms: Social partners instead of trade unions, representatives of the people instead of politicians, etc. | § Generalizations: Well-informed sources, all the press gathers information § Creation of new terms by affixation and composition: indictment, eurosceptic, trash TV, etc. § Excessive use of acronyms, often without explaining the content: IVA, hurry, AIRTEL, FENOSA, REPSOL, etc. |