Public service and commercial news: Contexts of production, genre conventions and textual claims in television.

In the sociology of mass communication, there is a gap in empirical research into how news corporations relate to professional and socially developed conventions about 'how to make news look like news'. Moreover, there is a gap in research on how public service and commercial television news services relate to such conventions, and on how such conventions, and the different productional contexts for public and commercial news, are reflected in television news programmes. By means of a case study, the thesis sets out to address precisely these gaps in an analysis of two news services: Dagsrevyen of the Norwegian public service corporation the NRK, and International News of the Scandinavian commercial satellite channel TV3. The thesis aims to analyse how relations to the state and the market, and to the institution (or formation) of news, are reflected in the everyday news production processes and in the news programmes. Through the analytical concepts of context, genre and textual claims, the productional processes, the presented news texts, and the relations between productional and textual aspects, are examined. More specifically, the following research issues are raised: 1. What elements constitute the production processes in the two channels. 2. What characterises the news programmes; the content, the composition/form and the presentation. 3. What are the relations between the productional aspects and the output/text of the news programmes. 4. To what extent do finance, news-policy, organisation of the news departments and the news-production processes produce similarities and differences in the two news programmes. To analyse the above issues, methods of observation, interviews, document analysis and qualitative and quantitative text analyses are applied. The examination of productional and textual aspects shows that although the broadcasters were clearly different in regard to policies and economic resources, the activities and the presented news texts were closely related to conventions for how to 'implement' the social institution of news. The policies to establish credibility and seriousness based on conventions descending from the news institution resulted in similarities in the two programmes. The theoretical framework developed for the analysis has made it possible to look further into the dynamics producing such similarities and differences.