My paper focuses on one issue raised by digital communication affecting journalism practices: what is the proper role of professional news journalism in the context of citizen journalism and the increasing role of social media in public communication? What news expertise is required or needed? By what means can it be demonstrated? At first, I present an ethnographic research project on the Swiss news media (2005- 2015), using a multi-method of analysis (interaction analysis, progression analysis, and argumentation theory) and a large collection of data (talk at work interactions, interviews, newswriting processes, retrospective verbal protocols). Then, I focus on a single case study: a TV debate broadcast in March 2013 on the “Minder initiative” aimed at limiting by the means of the law the salary of “big bosses”. After a very brief contextualization of what is at stake with this issue in Switzerland and Europe (with consequences in the USA and Japan), I analyze in details the steps of the making of the debate in the newsroom by an experienced TV journalist. For some critical reasons, the journalist invents a character and makes him intervene on-air during the debate, asking questions to the politicians via email and SMS. The interventions of this fictive character are unanimously considered “right and most relevant” by the debaters on stage. Apparently the debate involves lay and citizen participation, but in fact it is definitely under the control of the news maker. As it combines a close look to news products and newsmaking processes, an ethnographic approach gives an interesting insight to better understand the gap between what journalists say they do and what they really do in terms of public discussion and civic debate.

Marcel Burger teaches media discourse analysis in the field of interactional sociolinguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is leading the Centre for Linguistics and Language Sciences (CLSL) of the Faculty of Arts, and his main research interests include the construction of identity in media and political discourse. He is currently working in the domain of media ethnography on a multi method of analysis of news making processes and news products.

His latest books are:
Investigating Journalism practices. Combining media discourse analysis and newsroomethnography (2018)
La communication digitale. Entre affordances et discours multimodaux (2018)
Discourses of social media. Public, political and media issues (2017, with J. Thornborrow & R. Fitzgerald)