News values, the values that determine the newsworthiness of an event, have been researched from many perspectives and across several disciplines. They are said to impact heavily on journalistic practice and, as some argue, ‘govern each stage of the reporting and editing process’ (Cotter 2010: 73). In our own work, we take a complementary, discursive perspective from which we can conceptualize news values in terms of how newsworthiness is established through verbal and visual resources. A discursive perspective on news values allows us to systematically investigate how these values are constructed in the different types of textual material involved in the newsprocess (e.g. press release, interview, images, news story).

Dr Monika Bednarek joined the Department of Linguistics after gaining her PhD at the University of Augsburg, Germany, in 2005 and extensive post-doctoral research at the University of Sydney (2006-2008) and the University of Technology, Sydney (2008-2009). This research focused, respectively, on evaluative language in the 'popular' vs. the 'quality' press, emotion talk across registers of English, and, most recently, the language of fictional television.

Dr. Helen Caple is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Communication and Journalism with the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW. In 2009, she completed her PhD on image-text relations in print news media with the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Current research interests include news values, text-image relations, visual storytelling and the role of picture galleries in online news reporting. Helen has worked on research projects investigating the portrayal of women in sports by the Australian Media (with JMRC at UNSW) and investigating visual storytelling techniques at the ABC. A training module on visual storytelling was developed for the ABC as a result of this project. Other research interests include Ecolinguistics (language and the environment) and Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory (genre and discourse analysis). In 2013, Helen was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, UK. Helen is also a former press photographer.