Spatial Aspects of Personification in International News

Marta Severo (1) , Laurent Beauguitte (2)

1 DICEN-IDF - Dispositifs d'Information et de Communication à l'Ère du Numérique - Paris Île-de-France
2 GC (UMR_8504) - Géographie-cités

Together with politics, international news is often considered to be one of the most prestigious elds of journalism. However, making international news attractive is increasingly dicult. Today, one of the main strategies employed by journalists consists in mentioning individuals in the news. The reader is supposed to identify with the mentioned individual(s), and the story is expected to be more successful as a consequence. This paper investigates the interest of using quali-quantitative content analysis to study the semiotics of international news. We analyse six daily newspapers from three developed countries and examine three complementary aspects of the relation between individuals and international news : the level of personication, the type of individual mentioned and the geographical scale to which individuals is connected.

Keywords: Content Analysis; International News; Space; Personication; Rhetorical Strategies

Keywords: COUV; PARIS team

Domains: Library and information sciences; Geography

Marta Severo, Laurent Beauguitte. Spatial Aspects of Personification in International News. Compagno D. Quantitative Semiotic Analysis, Springer, pp.171-189, 2018, Quantitative Semiotic Analysis. Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-61593-6_9⟩. ⟨hal-03197841⟩