Previous studies indicate that news values take on material, cognitive, social, and discursive dimensions. Yet in this book, to avoid potential conflation of the four dimensions, Bednarek & Caple mainly address the discursive analysis of news values and propose a new theoretical approach—discursive news values analysis (DNVA)—for examining news values posited in semiotic modes of news products.

This book has three main parts. Part 1 is about introducing and clarifying concepts and ideas involved in analysing news values. Bednarek & Caple argue that news discourse can be systematically examined for its construction of newsworthiness through DNVA. This approach focuses on the discursive dimension of news values in news production to address issues such as the way news values are communicated discursively in the practice of news production. Since in many cases both visual and verbal modes construct and deliver news values, the authors suggest doing news-values analysis by combining multimodality, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics, which gives rise to the comprehensive method—corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (CAMDA). CAMDA situates research in analyzing complicated relations between different semiotic modes in news products. In addition, to investigate news values in news products within the framework of DNVA, news values are further confined to new boundaries. For instance, the news value impact is narrowed down to significant effects or consequences of a news event, rather than implying a news event's influence on a target audience. In addition, aesthetic appeal is added into the inventory of news values to explore the meaning of visual modes (e.g. news images).

Part 2 is about the application of the aforementioned frameworks to empirical analysis via three case studies. Chapter 6 explores whether a certain news topic (‘cyclist’ in this case) is frequently accompanied by certain news values (e.g. negativity) in English newspapers. Chapter 7 examines news values embedded in images on the social media platform Facebook. Both chapters 6 and 7 are monomodal analysis of news values, that is, the analysis is only concerning one single mode, either in texts or images. The co-existence of verbal and visual modes can be detected in chapter 8, where Bednarek & Caple develop in-depth analysis of the complex relation between the two modes. Though news values demonstrated in visual modes are often consistent with or complementary of the news values of texts, that is not always the case. Chances are that news values of some images (e.g. stock photographs) ‘clash’ with those in news texts, and this is considered as a way of enhancing a certain news value in texts.

Part 3 is an extension and reflection of the current new approach and method. To improve the framework of DNVA, the authors suggest future diachronic and cross-linguistic/cross-cultural research using the theories and tools in this book. Above all, this book possesses the ambition of giving insight for discourse analysts to examine the semiotic practice of newsworthiness construction. Additionally, it can serve as a new tool in critical discourse analysis for exploring ideologies embedded in news values.