The news values construction across old and new media in Chinese journalism

In order to understand the gains and losses of news values construction in the transfer of news storytelling from traditional news outlets to online and new media platforms, the study combines Discursive News Values Analysis and appraisal to examine three versions of the Mercedes car quality reported on the print newspaper, the news website and the Weibo network of People’s Daily. The findings show that Negativity, in the form of language descriptions of negative behavior in the automobile sales industry, is attributed to authoritative Eliteness (governmental institutions and official documents) in the newspaper. Thus, newsworthiness in the newspaper article serves to guide readers around knowledge building and ideological orientation. The news website story provides a number of visual and linguistic items construing both Negativity and Positivity associated with business Eliteness (Mercedes) and Personalization (the buyer) for a complete vision of the issue. In this regard, the news values construed via the website focus on information sharing in relation to the news actors and the event per se. On Weibo, Negativity toward business Eliteness (Mercedes) and Personalization (the buyer) takes on prominence across visual and verbal resources in the post. Negative appraisal resources used to depict the buyer’s right-defending experience and the Mercedes dealership’s unethical practice function to establish interpersonal relations with readers and further to elicit their evaluative reactions. In sum, the news value decisions of a news organization (People’s Daily) are dependent on technical affordances (verbally dominant, verbally-visually collaborated and visually dominant) and readers’ demands (knowledge, information and interactivity) in terms of the print, website and social media news reportage.