News discourse and the dissemination of knowledge and perspective: From print and monomodal to digital and multisemiotic

The paper focuses on the changes undergone by news discourse towards its current multisemiotic, digital nature. It is divided into three main sections; in the first one I focus on how multimodal/multisemiotic developments have been gradually entrenched in news reporting, from 17th-century woodblock engravings in the early news texts to contemporary convergent journalism, with special reference to the increasing interconnection between verbal output and visuals. Secondly, I illustrate the shift in topics and methodologies undergone by studies on news discourse particularly over the last few years, with attention to (a) news dissemination and consumer perception (b) the new language(s) of news. Finally, I present and discuss a pilot case study of multimodality in news reporting, focussing on the coverage by The New York Times of the birth and development of the European Union between 1946 and 2009. The study attempts to bring to the fore the role played by the dynamic interrelationship between image and verbal text in conveying the news stories and, possibly, the underlying perspective of the newspaper itself when informing readers on the steps leading to the shaping of the EU.