Co-editors: Ashley RIGGS and Lucile DAVIER

Deadline: November 19, 2023

We seek contributions for an edited volume on constructive news across cultures, to be published by Routledge in 2025 as the IATIS (International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies) Yearbook.

Summary

Constructive news (Bro, 2023; Haagerup, 2017), or solutions journalism (1), is much more than “good” or positive news. It is news that applies the tenets of positive psychology – in a nutshell, the notion that encouraging feelings of hope and optimism contributes to well-being – “to news processes and production in an effort to create productive and engaging coverage, while holding true to journalism’s core functions” (McIntyre & Gyldensted, 2017: 20; our emphasis). As such, it typically involves “rigorous reporting about how people are responding to problems” (Solutions Journalism Network, 2023) or about new initiatives being tested. The selection of stories goes beyond the five famous “W” questions to both the “How?” and, especially, the “What now?” (Constructive Institute, 2023). It is future-oriented; the main goals are to inform and to inspire; the content focuses on solutions, best practices, and productive outcomes rather than drama, violence, wrong-doing or victims, which in turn means a style that is “curious” (although this remains vague) rather than dramatic; and the role of the journalist is that of a fact-finder and facilitator, rather than of the “police” or a “judge” (Constructive Institute, 2023).

Constructive news thus provides an antidote to the “if it bleeds, it leads”-driven content and resulting negativity bias of most news. Research has shown that constructive news leads to positive results, including a feeling of agency and a readiness to engage with and act on the issues reported (Curry & Hammonds, 2014). Yet the nuts and bolts of how it accomplishes this (stylistic features or multimodality, for example) have been under-researched up to now. Put otherwise, constructive news is “done” differently than a lot of other mainstream news, but what exactly does this mean? Research suggests that constructive news can be addressed with qualitative or quantitative content analysis (Mast et al., 2019; Zhao & Xiang, 2019). We know that mainstream news models, practices or linguistic/stylistic choices (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Hanusch, 2017; Keeble, 2007 [1994]; Riggs, 2020, 2021) may differ across cultures; does this also show through in constructive news from different countries and/or regions? Preliminary research on a parallel corpus of English-Spanish constructive news (Riggs, in progress) shows that the content by linguaculture (i.e., language and culture) differs in terms of length, level of formality, use of metaphor, wordplay and interpellation, as well as didactic tone. Atanasova’s study (2022) of metaphor in constructive news from the UK that dealt with both COVID-19 and climate change found that colour and movement metaphor prevailed over the ubiquitous war metaphor, which could be considered a positive practice.

Constructive news is being produced in many different countries (Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, the USA and the UK, among others) at the level of local, regional and international news. The resulting news flows depend in part on translation / transediting (e.g., Davier, 2014 and 2022; Schäffner, 2012; Stetting, 1989; see a few examples of bilingual corpora in the Topics section). Are these processes also done differently in constructive news from different linguacultures? How do constructive news producers in different linguacultures approach news gathering? How do they see translation? How do their perceptions of translation influence the selection of sources and information? Is translation more or less visible in constructive journalism initiatives? Research on constructive news in translation is virtually non-existent; we would like to change this.

Furthermore, there is some evidence that contra-flows (Thussu 2007) – or media coverage from the South about the South – are more constructive (Marsh 2016; Zhang & Matingwina 2016) than North-South news flows, which tend to focus on violence and disasters rather than positive developments (Rantanen, 2019: 14). Therefore, studies about constructive journalism initiatives in the Global South or about the Global South will be particularly welcome.

Finally, in the era of convergence (Jenkins 2006; Quandt & Singer 2009; Davier & Conway 2019), audio-visual material plays an essential role in the “reading” experience (e.g., Caple, Huan & Bednarek, 2020; Filmer, 2016 and 2021; Filmer & Riggs, forthcoming; Riggs, 2021 and in progress; Tsai, 2015). How is such material incorporated into constructive news from different cultures? How does the interplay between text and image/video/hyperlinked information contribute to conveying the main message?

What might the study of visual and/or multimodal metaphor, usually reserved for advertising (e.g., Forceville, 2017) or political cartoons (e.g., El Refaie, 2003), tell us about trends or differences in their use across cultures? There is virtually no research on these questions, although Lough and McIntyre (2019) explore the visual representation of solutions, and Riggs’ (in progress) work suggests that while the Spanish corpus uses fewer metaphors than the English one, it “retrieves” some verbal metaphors through visual means.

We therefore invite abstracts from scholars in journalism studies, media studies, communication studies, translation studies or related disciplines, and focusing on one or a combination of the following areas. A cross-cultural or comparative perspective is essential.

Topics/Themes

• Comparative studies of constructive news content across linguacultures

• Stylistic features of constructive news

o Might include, but not limited to:

▪ Comparing use of verbal and visual/pictorial metaphor in constructive news from different (lingua)cultures

• Translated / transedited constructive news

o Translational phenomena in bilingual constructive news, e.g.,

▪ RESET. https://reset.org/ (German and English)

▪ Squirrel News. https://squirrel-news.net/ (German and English)

▪ Positive News and En Positivo. https://www.positive.news/ (English and Spanish)

o Monolingual constructive news that relies on sources in other languages

• Constructive news in/about the Global South

• Convergence and/or multimodality in constructive news

• Constructive news and ideology

• Teaching constructive journalism from an intercultural/cross-cultural perspective

• Sociology of constructive news: comparing constructive news practices across linguacultures

• Reader/stakeholder expectations of constructive news

• Effects of constructive news

• Comparative research from a diachronic perspective

Submission information and deadlines

➢ Language of the publication: English

➢ Abstracts should be 500 to 600 words, including references. They should be sent to Ashley

Riggs (ashleymerrill.riggs@unive.it) and Lucile Davier (Lucile.Davier@unige.ch). Please comply with the following structure:

- Introductory sentence

- Literature review

- Methods

- (Expected) data and results

- Potential impact for research, teaching and/or society

➢ Deadline for abstracts: 19 November 2023

➢ Notification of acceptance (potentially subject to revision): 27 November 2023

➢ Submission of proposal by co-editors: by 15 December 2023

➢ Submission of full-draft chapters by contributors: by 15 June 2024

➢ Notification of full-chapter acceptance: 15 July 2024

➢ Revision and editing phase: July – November 2024

➢ Submission of final manuscript to Routledge by co-editors: 20 December 2024

(1) McIntyre and Gyldensted (2017: 24) consider the latter to be a branch of the former.

REFERENCES

Atanasova, D. (2022). How Constructive News Outlets Reported the Synergistic Effects of Climate Change and Covid-19 Through Metaphors. Journalism Practice 16(2-3): 384–403.

Bro, P. (2023). Constructive Journalism: Precedents, Principles, and Practices. London: Routledge.

Caple, H., Huan, C., and Bednarek, M. (2020). Multimodal News Analysis Across Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Constructive Institute. (2023). The future of journalism is constructive. Retrieved from https://constructiveinstitute.org/ (last accessed 16/10/2023).

Curry, A. L., & Hammonds, K. H. (2014). The Power of Solutions Journalism. Report on the Engaging

News Project. Center for Media Engagement. https://mediaengagement.org/research/solutions-journalism/

Davier, L. (2022). 'People have probably offered to buy me a dictionary 20 times since I’ve been here':

Risk management within a community of journalists in francophone Canada. JosTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation, 37, 35–54. Retrieved from https://www.jostrans.org/issue37/art_davier.pdf

Davier, L. (2014). The paradoxical invisibility of translation in the highly multilingual context of news agencies. Global Media and Communication, 10(1), 53–72. doi:10.1177/1742766513513196

Davier, L., & Conway, K. (2019). Introduction: Journalism and translation in the era of convergence. In L. Davier & K. Conway (Eds.), Journalism and Translation in the Era of Convergence (pp. 1–11). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

El Refaie, E. (2003). Understanding visual metaphor: the example of newspaper cartoons. Visual Communication, 2(1): 75–95.

Filmer, D. (2021). Italy’s Politicians in the News. Journalistic Translation and Cultural Representation. Bologna: Odoya.

Filmer, D. (2016). Did you really say that? Voiceover and the recreation of reality in Berlusconi’s ‘’shocking’’ interview for Newsnight. Special Issue: Ideological Manipulation in Audiovisual Translation, Other Modernities, 2: 21–41.

Filmer, D., & Riggs, A. (Forthcoming). Translating the cultural Other during Covid: A comparative study of Italian and UK online news. Intralinea.

Forceville, C. (2017). Visual and Multimodal Metaphor in Advertising: Cultural Perspectives. Styles of Communication, 9(2): 26–41. http://stylesofcomm.fjsc.unibuc.ro/archives/vol-9-no-2

Haagerup, U. (2017). Constructive News: How to Save the Media and Democracy with Journalism of Tomorrow. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus.

Hallin, D.C., and Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hanusch, F., ed. (2017). Comparing Journalistic Cultures. Journalism Studies, Special Issue 18(5).

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Keeble, R. (2007 [1994]). The Newspapers Handbook. London: Routledge.

Lough, K., and McIntyre, K. (2019). Visualizing the solution: An analysis of the images that accompany solutions-oriented news stories. Journalism, 20 (4): 583–599. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918770553

Marsh, V. (2016). Mixed messages, partial pictures? Discourses under construction in CCTV’s Africa Live compared with the BBC. Chinese Journal of Communication, 9(1), 56–70. doi:10.1080/17544750.2015.1105269

Mast, J., Coesemans, R., & Temmerman, M. (2019). Constructive journalism: Concepts, practices, and discourses. Journalism, 20(4), 492–503. doi:10.1177/1464884918770885

McIntyre, K., and Gyldensted, C. (2017). Constructive Journalism: Applying Positive Psychology Techniques to News Production. The Journal of Media Innovations, 4(2): 20–34. doi: 10.5617/jomi.v4i2.2403

Quandt, T., & Singer, J. B. (2009). Convergence and cross-platform content production. In K. Wahl-

Jorgensen & T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), The Handbook of Journalism Studies (pp. 130–144). London: Routledge.

Rantanen, T. (2019). News agencies from telegraph bureaus to cyberfactories. In M. Powers (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (pp. 1–22). doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.843

Riggs, A. (In progress). Verbal and visual communication in constructive news across cultures: Case study of a bi-lingual English-Spanish corpus with a focus on metaphor [working title].

Riggs, A. (2021.) How online news headlines and accompanying images “translate” a violent event: A cross-cultural case study. Language and Intercultural Communication, 21: 352–365.

Riggs, A. (2020). Stylistic Deceptions in Online News: Journalistic Style and the Translation of Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350114203

Schäffner, C. (2012). Rethinking transediting. Meta: Translators' Journal, 54(4), 866–883. doi:10.7202/1021222ar

Solutions Journalism Network. (2023). Transforming news is critical to building a more equitable and sustainable world. Retrieved from https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/ (last accessed 16/10/2023).

Stetting, K. (1989). Transediting: a new term for coping with the grey area between editing and translating. In G. Caie, K. Haastrup and A. L. Jakobsen (Eds.), Proceedings from the Fourth Nordic

Conference for English Studies (pp. 371–382). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.

Thussu, D. K. (2007). Introduction. In D. K. Thussu (Ed.), Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow (pp. 1–8). London: Routledge.

Tsai, C. (2015). Reframing Humor in TV News Translation. Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 23(4): 615–633.

Zhang, Y., & Matingwina, S. (2016). Constructive journalism: A new journalistic paradigm of Chinese media in Africa. In X. Zhang, H. Wasserman, & W. Mano (Eds.), China’s Media and Soft Power in Africa: Promotion and Perceptions (pp. 93–105). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zhao, X., & Xiang, Y. (2019). Does China's outward focused journalism engage a constructive approach? A qualitative content analysis of Xinhua News Agency's English news. Asian Journal of Communication, 29(4), 346–362. doi:10.1080/01292986.2019.1606263