Spatial aspects of personification in international news

Marta Severo

Laurent Beauguitte

pp. 171-189

in: Dario Compagno (ed), Quantitative semiotic analysis, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Together with politics, international news is often considered to be one of the most prestigious fields of journalism. However, making international news attractive is increasingly difficult. 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 personification, the type of individual mentioned and the geographical scale to which individuals is connected.