Private and Public in Mass Media Communication

This project was devoted to the manifold ways in which the domains of the private and the public affect mass media communication. The core part of the project was devoted the study of personalisation in British online newspapers, resulting in the publication of a research monograph The Personalisation of Mass Media Communication (Benjamins, 2014). In this study, five British online news sites were studied and the different types of strategies they used in order to present news as something personal were analysed. The study presents developed a model that integrates and differentiates between dimensions of the personalisation of news, such as technical aspects of the communicative setting (e.g. the options for readers to comment on news and to interact with journalists), the level of content (e.g. the selection of news topics and the perspective from which they are presented) and linguistic strategies (e.g. the use of direct speech and first and second person pronouns).

Published Research

• Landert, Daniela & Andreas H. Jucker. 2011. 

  “Private and public in mass media communication: From letters to the editor to online commentaries”.

   Journal of Pragmatics 43(5). 1422–1434.
• Landert, Daniela. 2014a. 

  Personalisation in Mass Media Communication. British online news between public and private.

   (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 240). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Landert, Daniela. 2014b. 

  “Blurring the boundaries of mass media communication? Interaction and user-generated content on online news sites”.

   In Jukka Tyrkkö & Sirpa Leppänen (eds.), Texts and Discourses of New Media (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 15). Helsinki: VARIENG.
• Jucker, Andreas H. & Daniela Landert. 2015. 

  “Historical pragmatics and early speech recordings: Diachronic developments in turn-taking and narrative structure in radio talk shows”

  . Journal of Pragmatics 79. 22–39.
• Landert, Daniela. 2015. “Reportable facts and a personal touch: The functions of direct quotes in online news”. In Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz & Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, 29–52. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
• Landert, Daniela. 2017. “Participation as user involvement”. In Christian R. Hoffmann & Wolfram Bublitz (eds.), Pragmatics of Social Media (Handbooks of Pragmatics 11), 31–60. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Landert, Daniela & Gianluca Miscione. 2017. 

  “Narrating the stories of leaked data: The changing role of journalists after Wikileaks and Snowden”.

   Discourse, Context & Media 19. 13–21.