Stancing: Strategies of entextualizing stance in newswriting Daniel Perrin n Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland article info Available online 13 October 2012 Keywords: Stancing Multi-method research Grounded theory Progression analysis Newswriting abstract By stancing, I understand the process of taking one’s own position within organizational, institutional, and societal frames of reference and encoding it, through collaborative practices of text production, by using linguistic and further semiotic means. The article starts by discussing the key concept of stancing in more detail (Section 1); then outlines progression analysis as the multimethod approach applied to identify stancing practices (Section 2); explains how progression analysis was applied in the IDE ´ E SUISSE research project (Section 3); presents exemplary findings from German- and French-speaking contexts (Section 4); and discusses how insights from field research can be generalized and contribute to increasing scientific and professional (meta-)linguistic knowledge and awareness related to journalistic stance and stancing (Section 5). & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Key concepts: Stancing as the situated activity of taking a position What product-oriented approaches conceptualize as journalistic stance in news items, is, from a process perspective, the result of newswriting: a complex and emergent interplay of situated production, reproduction, and recontextualization activities (Catenaccio et al., 2011; Van Hout, 2011; Perrin, 2012a) with individuals’ psychobiographies, social settings such as newsrooms, and contextual resources such as ‘‘glocalization’’ (Khondker, 2004). In my article, I address stancing from such a process perspective. By stancing, I understand the practice of taking and encoding a particular position. Position refers to implicit or explicit commitments that are based on judgments, assessments and thus are related to subjective properties such as opinions, attitudes, and emotions. In journalism, positions are encoded through collaborative practices of text production (Perrin, 2011) within individual, organizational, institutional, and societal frames of reference. The process of encoding stance is guided by professional values and principles such as newsworthiness (e.g., Schultz, 2007) and audience design (e.g., Bell, 2001). On an operative level, stancing results in using or omitting specific linguistic and semiotic means such as evaluation markers and reported speech. These linguistic and semiotic means in the final products have been analyzed in detail for various domains, as well as diachronically and using large corpora (Biber, 2004). Various media genres have attracted researchers’ interest, in particular the apparently impartial genre of hard news reports (for an overview see White, this issue; for a cross-cultural perspective Pounds, 2010; Thomson et al., 2008). In media products, stance has been identified on two levels. First, stance appears in journalists’ own voices, as authorial stance or ‘‘speaker subjectivity’’ (for an overview see Vis, this issue, for a multimodal analysis of authorial emotion in television news see Pounds, this issue). Second, stance is the consequence of ‘‘reporting reporting’’ (Caldas-Coulthard, 1994); it is attributed to and encoded in the reported speech of quoted sources, such as experts, eye-witnesses, spokespersons from interested parties, decision-makers, and people concerned by their decisions. Findings of product-oriented research suggest that journalists can stand close to sources or distant from them—and motivate the audience to do the same. By framing the attributed positions, for example as relevant and reliable or as ‘‘but one of a range of possible alternative positions’’ (White, 2012), the audience can be ‘‘positioned to accept, question, doubt or reject propositions attributed to outside sources’’ (White, 2012). An example is the ‘‘dialogistic association’’, the ‘‘positioning of the authorial voice re the attributed position’’ (White, 2012) by using reporting verbs that frame quoted utterances positively (e.g., she reveals), neutrally (she says), or negatively (she claims) (e.g., Clift, 2006). Stance, however, extends beyond linguistic means. On the one hand, it is also expressed through semiotic systems such as visual signs (Economou, 2008), especially in video genres such as television news (Pounds, this issue). On the other hand, it results in consequences far Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dcm Discourse, Context & Media 2211-6958/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2012.10.005 n Tel.: þ41 79 6 949 757. E-mail address: daniel.perrin@zhaw.ch Discourse, Context & Media 1 (2012) 135–147