STUDIA UBB EPHEMERIDES, LIX, 1, 2014 (p. 31-49) MANAGING PROXIMITY RELATIONS BETWEEN JOURNALIST AND READER IN PRINT MEDIA DISCOURSE. THE CURIOUS CASE OF A STUDENT MAGAZINE ADRIAN HAZAPARU 1 ABSTRACT. This study is analyzing the concept of journalistic proximity, applied to print media discourse. The author aimed to highlight the importance attributed to geographical, chronological, social and psycho- emotional proximity (in this paper referred to as “default proximity”) in establishing a connection with the readers and how this connection can be maintained and prolonged (in this paper referred to as “proximization”). After a document analysis, a corpus-based discourse analysis and a multimodal analysis on a local student magazine, the results revealed that proximity is approached differently depending on journalistic genres, and not on audience profile, as generally presumed – obvious in informative and utilitarian pieces and obscure in opinion and interpretation pieces. A second part of the study revealed proximization strategies employed by the editorial team in order to catch the reader’s attention, regardless of the existent proximity relations. The results showed that the lack of proximity relations can be addressed by paratext elements and its management within the newspaper layout. Key-words: journalistic proximity – communication – discourse analysis – proximization strategies 1. Theoretical background Proximity is one of the most important concepts in journalism and it is widely considered, both by practitioners and theoreticians, among the criteria that account for the newsworthiness of some facts, situations or events 1 PhD, Department of Journalism and Communication Sciences, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania, adihazaparu@yahoo.com