| Table of Contents |
| | List of tables | ix |
| | List of figures | xi |
| | Acknowledgements | xiii |
| ch. 1 | Introduction | 1 |
| ch. 2 | Personalisation in mass media | 9 |
| 2.1. | Mass media communication between impersonality and personalisation | 11 |
| 2.2. | Personalisation and linguistic immediacy | 18 |
| 2.3. | Public, private, involving, and immediate | 23 |
| 2.4. | Modelling personalisation | 31 |
| ch. 3 | Data collection | 37 |
| 3.1. | Working with online data | 37 |
| 3.2. | Characteristics of the online news sites 40 | |
| 3.3. | Overview of collected data sets | 42 |
| 3.3.1. | The online data | 42 |
| 3.3.2. | The Times from 1985 | 48 |
| 3.4. | Technical aspects | 49 |
| 3.4.1. | Zotero snapshots | 50 |
| 3.4.2. | Screenshots | 51 |
| 3.4.3. | Inconsistencies between formats | 51 |
| 3.4.4. | XML format | 52 |
| 3.5. | A comment on statistics | 55 |
| ch. 4 | Feedback and interaction | 59 |
| 4.1. | Audience interaction in mass media communication | 61 |
| 4.1.1. | Modelling audience interaction | 61 |
| 4.1.2. | Interaction on online news sites - a brief history | 65 |
| 4.2. | Forms of feedback and interaction | 67 |
| 4.2.1. | Indirect feedback | 67 |
| 4.2.2. | User comments | 69 |
| 4.2.3. | Opinion polls | 75 |
| 4.2.4. | Contact details and profiles | 77 |
| 4.2.5. | Audience content | 79 |
| 4.3. | Strategies for integrating user-generated content | 83 |
| 4.3.1. | Separation: The Times Online and the Guardian | 85 |
| 4.3.2. | Integration: BBC News | 87 |
| 4.3.3. | Blurring: The Mail Online and the Sun | 89 |
| 4.4. | Summary and conclusion | 91 |
| ch. 5 | Visual elements | 93 |
| 5.1. | Overview of visual elements in news articles | 94 |
| 5.2. | Images and personalisation | 97 |
| 5.2.1. | Functional relations between visual and textual elements | 99 |
| 5.2.2. | The content of visual elements | 105 |
| 5.2.3. | Interactive functions of images: How the content is depicted | 108 |
| 5.3. | Case study: Visual elements in reports on the Edlington hearing | 114 |
| 5.4. | Summary and conclusion | 124 |
| ch. 6 | News actors | 125 |
| 6.1. | Official, private, and celebrity actors | 126 |
| 6.2. | Main topics and actors in top-listed news articles | 131 |
| 6.2.1. | Topic categories in news articles | 132 |
| 6.2.2. | Actor constellations in different topic categories | 134 |
| 6.2.3. | Topic categories across news sites | 136 |
| 6.3. | Representing the actors | 139 |
| 6.4. | Case study revisited: Personalising content in reports on the Edlington hearing | 144 |
| 6.5. | Summary and conclusion | 158 |
| ch. 7 | Direct speech | 161 |
| 7.1. | Forms of speech representation | 163 |
| 7.1.1. | Leech and Short's classification | 164 |
| 7.1.2. | Faithfulness claims | 166 |
| 7.1.3. | Modifications to Leech and Short's classification | 170 |
| 7.2. | Functions of direct speech | 174 |
| 7.3. | Frequency of direct speech | 180 |
| 7.3.1. | Quantifying direct speech | 180 |
| 7.3.2. | Direct speech across subcorpora | 183 |
| 7.4. | Source types | 186 |
| 7.4.1. | Categorisation of source types | 187 |
| 7.4.2. | Named, identified and anonymous sources | 192 |
| 7.4.3. | Private and official sources | 194 |
| 7.5. | Summary and conclusion | 197 |
| ch. 8 | Personal pronouns | 199 |
| 8.1. | Reference of first and second person pronouns | 200 |
| 8.2. | First and second person pronouns as features of immediacy and involvement | 207 |
| 8.3. | Frequency of first and second person pronouns | 210 |
| 8.3.1. | Identification of first and second person pronouns | 210 |
| 8.3.2. | First and second person pronouns across subcorpora | 213 |
| 8.4. | First and second person pronouns within direct speech in news articles | 215 |
| 8.5. | First and second person pronouns outside of direct speech in news articles | 233 |
| 8.6. | First person singular pronouns across different types of articles | 237 |
| 8.7. | Summary and conclusion | 242 |
| ch. 9 | Conclusion | 245 |
| | References | 257 |
| | Appendix A. List of articles | 271 |
| | Appendix B. Statistical tests | 281 |
| | Author index | 291 |
| | Subject index | 293 |
