Digital Affordances and Evaluative Stance: Redefining Hard News Orbital Structure

Abstract

This study approaches the question of how text generic structure acts as semiotic instantiations of evaluative stance, particularly in the online context. In this respect, it explores the generic structure of online reportage stories with its multitude modes, distinctive rhetorical structure and layout with a view to differentiating them from their printed counterparts and extending the theoretical tools in this area by introducing slight modifications to Iedema, Feez and White’s (1994) model for hard news generic structure. Doing so, the study employs Mann and Thompson’s (1988) approach to genre so as to determine reportage nuclearity and Thompson and Hunston’s (2000) model of evaluation to relate evaluation to text organisational structure. It takes a case study of one of New York Times online reportage stories criticising Egypt’s sugar crisis (2017) to trace how the schematic structure of this story influences and multiplies the evaluative stance. The delicate modifications intend to help in digging deep into the embedded evaluative stance of the online news reportage stories. The study concludes that online reportage can be recognized as a macro genre that includes two interrelated yet independent sub-genres with two nucleus-satellites unites. As for the underlying evaluative stance, the analysis reveals how the NYT reportage story under discussion evaluates the Egyptian sugar crisis along with negatively attributing it to the current government.

Keywords

• evaluative stance
• digital affordance
• online genre
• orbital structure
• reportage stories