A study on journalism from a computational linguistic perspective. A corpus based analysis on Italian journalism.

Abstract

The influence that modern technologies have massively brought to the way people communicate and inform themselves leaves a clear trace on today's journalistic style. The objective of this thesis is to develop a reflection on the evolution of language used in Italian journalism by examining a large corpus of journalistic articles published online by two famous Italian newspapers. Through the use of computational tools, I extracted data on style variations in Italian newspapers over the past years and I compared the journalistic lexicon with that of more modern media, detecting correlations useful to study the impact of new media on journalistic communication. The thesis aims to highlight a simplification of journalistic language that has occurred in correlation with the advent of social media and a relative adaptation of news outlets to the communicative style of these.