Weibo News Package: a Systemic Functional Perspective on the Text-Reader Relationship

This book offers an academic dialogue between news values construction and readers' evaluative response in Weibo news package from the interpersonal perspective. The study focuses on the under-researched field of news reception, i.e. how the media-reader relationship can be influenced by readers' feedback. By combing multimodal discourse analysis and corpus methods, this book aims to address the following three research questions regarding the text-reader relationship in Weibo news package: (1) what are the gains and losses in the transfer of news values constructed across platforms and news media? (2) how are Chinese language and emoji collaborated to realize attitudinal meanings and advance readers' positions in news comments? (3) how does readers' response overlap or mismatch with particular news value in a story across news text-reader relations, reader-reader relations and extra text-reader relations? The book has social, theoretical and pedagogical implications for the changing landscape of (Chinese) news discourse and audience studies. Socially, the findings of news and comments analysis show that news value decisions can be negotiated due to readers' active engagement via the social media commenting function. Theoretically, a responsive model of evaluative readings has been built for a better understanding of social media multimodal comments through the lens of reading positions and emoji-text interactions. The book is of interest to researchers in media and communication studies, but can also be used as a reference book for (under)graduate students in social semiotics, linguistics and journalism to learn how to analyze multimodal and interactive (news) texts on social media by triangulation of theories and methodologies.