Abstract
On 16 February 1995 the front page of the New York Times carried John Markoff's riveting account of events leading to the arrest of Kevin Mitnicks a 30-year old man charged with computer fraud and illegal use of a telephone access device. This paper examines a news composition process in which what could have been a simple report of the capture and arrest of an accused white collar criminal was transformed into a culturally significant tale of social order through the participation of a journalist, readers and subjects in interlocking systems of composition, cognition, and culture.
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