Investigating evaluation and news values in news items that are shared through social media
The sharing of news through social media platforms is now a significant part of mainstream online media use and is an increasingly important consideration in journalism practice and production. This paper analyses the linguistic characteristics of online news sharing on Facebook, with a focus on evaluation and news values in a corpus of the 100 'most shared' news items from 'heritage' English language news media organisations. Analyses combine corpus linguistic techniques (semantic tagging, frequency analysis, concordancing) with manual, computer aided annotation. The main focus is on discursive news values analysis (DNVA) which examines how news values are established through semiotic resources, enabling new empirical insights into shared news and adding a specific linguistic focus to the emerging literature on news sharing. Results suggest that all 'traditional' news values appear to be construed in the shared news corpus and that there is variety in terms of the items that are widely shared. At the sa.