ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 concerns how evaluation contributes to hard news story design. Hard news stories seek to report on events and inform readers. In such stories, evaluation is often moderately but strategically used to skilfully weave together the headline/lead opening and the remaining paragraphs. Section 4.1 introduces the main characteristics of the hard news story. It also argues that journalistic stance, discourse structure, as well as averral and attribution can be brought together and studied from the perspective of evaluation-driven hard news story design. Section 4.2 sketches the distribution of different types of evaluative markers in the SCMP hard news sub-corpus. Section 4.3 shows that in the headline/lead opening, evaluation plays a potentially prominent role in grabbing attention and setting the news angle, as seen in this part’s disproportionately high concentration of evaluative markers used to maximize newsworthiness. More revealingly, hard news stories about accidents/crime and those about politics are shown to exhibit marked differences in evaluation use. Section 4.4 looks at some complete hard news stories and how different types of evaluative markers help to establish and develop the news angle, an indication that non-authorial evaluations also need to be considered for a better grasp of how evaluation contributes to hard news story design.
