This document provides an overview of linguistic ethnography and its application to the study of news journalism. It discusses cultural ecology and key aspects of ethnographic research like participation, observation and documenting social contexts. The document outlines how newsroom ethnographies examine the organizational processes and professional ideologies that influence news production. It also ties linguistic ethnography to the analysis of social discourses, contexts and specific empirical examples, like a case study of how journalists at a Belgian newspaper write from sources.

1. How journalists source newsA linguisticethnographic approachUniversitécatholique de Louvain14 October 2012 Dr. Tom Van Hout tom.vanhout@gmail.com

2. etHnograPHY A 5-slide primer on:

3. Foto: medhead (flickr.com)

4. culturalecology a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms the irreducibility of human experience. (Willis & Trondman 2002: 394)

5. ethnography studies meaning in context (fieldwork) participates in, observesandreconstructs documents the how, whatandwhy makes the familiarstrange(process) makes the strangefamiliar(product)

6. ethnographic analysis case studymethodology = micro-level analyses of social action evidential: empiricalfacts conjectural: meaning in context knowledge is generatedinductively

7. ethnographic analysis Blommaert, Jan, & Dong, Jie. (2010). Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner's Guide. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

8. NEWS etHnograPHY Next, a 3 slide outline of

9. newsroomethnographies the organisationalrequirements of news combine with the professional ideology of objectivity to routinely privilege the voices of the powerful, and this further reinforces the tendency towards the standardised and ideological nature of news. (Cottle 2007: 4)

10. atale of twoparadigms Paterson, Chris, & Domingo, David (Eds.). (2011). Making Online News - Volume 2. Newsroom Ethnography in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism (Vol. 2). New York: Peter Lang. Bird, Elizabeth S. (Ed.). (2010). The Anthropology of News and Journalism: Global perspectives. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

12. LinguisticetHnograPHY Andfinally: 2 slides on

13. tying down & opening up "'tying ethnography down': pushing ethnography towards the analysis of clearly delimitable processes, increasing the amount of reported data that is open to falsification, looking to impregnate local description with analytical frameworks drawn from outside. [...] 'opening linguistics up': inviting reflexive sensitivity to the processes involved in the production of linguistic claims and to the potential importance of what gets left out, encouraging a willingness to accept (and run with) the fact that beyond the reach of standardised falsification procedures '[e]xperience … has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas'." Rampton et al 2004: 4

14. discourses education workplace community literacy multimodality

15. empiricalexample Oct 2006 – March 2007 De Standaard How do journalists write from sources?

16. access ‘foot in the door’ approach interview ‘meeloopdag’ fieldwork

17. fieldwork trial & error research protocol story identification reporter confirmation data recording & observation retrospective interview

18. parameters Analyzing the spatiotemporal unfolding of news production; Describing concrete situations in order to interrogate claims made about journalism; Alternating between levels of analytical magnification; Sustaining a dialogue between theory, observation and interpretation

19. veldwerk

21. analysis

22. interview My first idea was actually Now I must give the floor to ‘Ma bon’, it’s Apple

23. Writing at warp speed

24. descriptivestats

25. pausebehavior

26. fluency

27. progression

28. writingfrom sources what journalists do, how they do so and why; knowledge mediation and journalistic representation processes; and ultimately have wider applicability for the study of media production, intertextualityand cultural production in general.