Summary
Contents
The SAGE Key Concepts series provide students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding. Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension. Key Concepts in Journalism offers a systematic and accessible introduction to the terms, processes, and effects of journalism;a combination of practical considerations with theoretical issues; and further reading suggestions. The authors bring an enormous range of experience in newspaper and broadcast journalism, at national and regional level, as well as their teaching expertise. This book will be essential reading for students in journalism, and an invaluable reference tool for their professional careers.
Macrostructure
Macrostructure
The hierarchical organization of meaning in texts. Used most prominently in van Dijk's (1988a; 1988b) analyses of international news stories, macrostructures are a concept developed within the discourse analytic tradition of journalism studies. ‘The point of macrostructures’, van Dijk (no date) argues, is that ‘texts not only have local or microstructural relations between subsequent sentences, but that they also have overall structures that define their global coherence and organisation.’ Macrostructures are derived from three rules: ‘by eliminating those propositions which are not relevant for the interpretation of other propositions (deletion), by converting a series of specific propositions into a more general proposition (generalisation) and by constructing a proposition from a number of propositions in the text (construction)’ (Tomlin et al., 1997: 90). Texts are easier ...
