Genre analysis of English news stories in selected Philippine online student publications

Abstract

Using genre analysis as its primary theoretical orientation, this descriptive study examined online news stories written in English by Philippine student journalists from four top universities in the country. From each online student publication, 20 straight news articles were collected to constitute the research corpus of 80 news stories. The study sought to describe the news values embodied by the news actors, sources, events and issues in order to infer what online student publications consider as newsworthy; moreover, it wanted to determine the obligatory and optional components of news stories; the syntactical and lexical features of their headlines and the rhetorical styles of their news lead. It was hoped that information gained from this research could benefit student journalists, school paper advisers, journalism teachers, and applied linguists who want to study the language of media. Bell’s (1991) News Structure Model was the basic framework for analysis, and a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was employed to arrive at answers to the research questions. Based on the macro-level analysis, eliteness and proximity were the top news values that characterized news actors and events suggesting that when student journalists select topics for their stories, they tend to prefer writing about popular and powerful people and events which have geographical nearness and cultural proximity to their target readers. The results of the micro-level analysis suggested that English news stories written by Filipino student journalists adhere to journalistic conventions and the way they are presented in the virtual context closely resemble their print counterpart. Emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between news values and news text, the proposed model for writing English hard news stories for online student publication presented its obligatory components as the headline, attribution (byline and publication date), the lead, and the story proper (actors, action, attribution, setting, commentary, and previous episodes).