Discourse culture(s) of journalism: Newswriting in Dutch and Iranian handbooks

Abstract

Ten handbooks of journalism most-used in Dutch and Iranian (applied) universities were content-analyzed and compared for their instructions on (crime) newswriting and assumptions behind the given instructions. While Dutch handbooks consider ‘informing’ the optimal function of journalism and news, Iranian handbooks put emphasis on ‘increasing awareness’. Consequently, Dutch handbooks consider news as event and value information on facts, while Iranian handbooks aim for reporting the truth and consider news as on-going process. Specifically, as Iranian journalism handbooks value flexibility and creativity, they view storytelling style in news reports as the preferred journalistic genre and approach crime news as a special genre which should fulfill an educative function.

Introduction

Although the interest in news and its centrality to journalism is rather prevalent, news can differ across societies (Zelizer, 2017): Journalism adapts to its surrounding context to serve its functions; as a result, news discourse is embedded in a cultural context and therefore correlates with political and social values, and with accepted communication styles (Van Dijk, 1985). Yet, how news is conceptualized, that is, what its optimal functions and forms are across cultural contexts (Broersma, 2011) is not broadly studied. In the Anglo-American ideology, journalism was long and strongly associated with democracy (Josephi, 2012). Although global studies of journalism have offered a rich body of knowledge about different journalism cultures (Hanitzsch et al., 2019; Weaver & Willnat, 2012), the association of journalism with democracy has been so strong that its trace has led to a simplified perspective in journalism, labeled “orientalist” by Ranji (2021), that generalizes over all non-Western journalism and which is still observable in and across academia (see Ranji, 2021). In recent years, researchers are starting to fit journalistic practices in non-democratic countries into their conceptual models (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2018: p. 147). Still, journalism in these countries is mostly studied in how it is practiced and not in how it is conceptualized. Journalism training in practices and their underlying concepts is a relatively new object of attention, for instance of the UNESCO Series on Journalism Education, and is useful to trace different instructions and conceptualizations about newswriting (Zelizer, 2009) and about media representations (Deuze, 2006). Yet, journalism training has received little attention in academic research (Deuze, 2006: p. 19) and a cross-national perspective is lacking. An exception is the study of Russian and Belarusian handbooks by Zagidullina et al. (2021), in which conceptualizations of journalism are compared by semantic analysis of journalism definitions.

In our study, we aim at uncovering the discourse cultures of news in two linguistically and historically different cultures, Iran and the Netherlands, by analyzing instructive journalism handbooks for their conceptualization of ideal forms and functions of news. We understand discourse culture as the discourse used by the community of journalists, journalism teachers and journalism students to talk and write about journalism practices and the journalism profession. This includes the common instructions and normative values. We take a similar approach to Zagidullina et al. (2021), in that we inductively look for emerging concepts about journalism and journalistic writing. Contrary to Zagidullina et al. (2021), we do not limit our analysis to the definitions of journalism; rather, we aim at scrutinizing the instructions and assumptions about journalism and journalistic writing, zooming in on the discourse of first-hand (hard) news and newswriting, with an additional focus on crime news. By scrutinizing preferred stylistic choices and normative values of journalism and newswriting in Iranian handbooks in comparison to Dutch ones, we aim to provide a response to the call for de-westernizing journalism studies (Wasserman and De Beer, 2009).

Significance of handbooks: Discourse culture of news and newswriting

Handbooks of journalism present an ideal image of journalism and journalistic practices from the perspective of scholars many of whom have experience as journalists (Weedon and Wilson, 2017). These handbooks are “considered a powerful part of education process” and respected by to-be journalists “as truth” (Hardin et al., 2006: p. 430); as such, they construct an integral part of journalism culture (Shapiro, 2010), especially in today’s journalism profession in which education is being more valued (Deuze and Witschge, 2018; Firth and Meech, 2007). Journalism handbooks thus shape a significant aspect of journalism culture: applying regulations for newswriting is a central way through which journalism defines itself as a profession, differentiating news from other narratives such as everyday-storytelling and factual stories narrated by non-journalists. Stylistic choices described in journalism handbooks are framed as specific and unique means through which journalists can transfer their professional mission to their audience. Handbooks indicate codification rules for writing news and ideologies behind those rules: assumptions about news audience, news functions, and journalism’s role in society (Cameron, 1996). Thus, the discourse of journalism handbooks is embedded as well as represents the cultural context from which they stem.

The study of journalism handbooks

Journalism education has been in the scope of attention in the past two decades (e.g., Bierhoff et al., 2000; Firth and Meech, 2007; Fröhlich and Holtz-Bacha, 2003; Hirst, 2010; Mensing, 2010; Zelizer, 2004). Studies focusing on journalism handbooks can be divided into two groups: studies of handbooks in search for other subjects such as gender representation (Hardin et al., 2006) and representation of US presidency (Parks, 2020); and studies of handbooks in pursuit of the discourse of instructions for newswriting and conceptualizations of journalism. Examples are the analysis of journalism conceptions in Russian and Belarusian handbooks (Zagidullina et al., 2021), instructions for the use of emotion in newswriting (Hopper and Huxford, 2017), suicide coverage (Parks, 2019), coverage of disability and social issues in sports journalism (Weedon and Wilson, 2017).

In their cross-cultural study, Zagidullina et al. (2021) focused on definitions of journalism in two countries with language similarities, Russian and Belarusian; while the former conceptualizes journalism as “a regular system with institutional mechanisms”, the latter considers it “individual art-literary writing” (Zagidullina et al., 2021: p. 2). In his diachronic study of American handbooks, Parks (2019) found how instructions for coverage of suicide over the last century have changed from a popular human-interest story to a private issue. In sum, change in context considerably affects journalism conceptions and practices. Though educational handbooks have received recent attention, few studies focus on conceptualizations of journalism, and none address first-hand accounts of newsworthy events.

Iranian and Dutch journalism

Both Iran and the Netherlands have long traditions in journalism as profession and in journalism education. First practices of Dutch journalism go back to the 17th century; in Iran, the tradition dates back to 1837, when the first newspaper appeared. Journalism training in the Netherlands started in 1903 (Terzis, 2009) with the higher education programs facing a rise in the 1990’s; today, journalism is mostly taught from originally Dutch handbooks, at applied universities, although many of the present day journalists have been trained in university journalism programs (Hermans, 2016). In Iran, training journalists started in 1938 and the first handbook of journalism appeared in 1954. Iranian journalism has been influenced by Western journalism, in practices and education, since the start (Mohsenian-Rad et al., 2009). Today, journalism is taught at many higher education universities and institutes and several handbooks can be found that are written by native authors, both academic scholars and experienced journalists.

Dutch journalism can be described as free in the sense that there is no systematic control or suppression of journalistic activities, while it is believed to have a relatively high degree of power over the state (De Haan, 2012); however, it has received criticisms for claiming a monopoly to the news, for religious and political pillarization and for commercialization (Broersma, 2011). The Dutch media system could previously be identified as democratic corporatist with high circulation and a regulator’s role from the government, in which newspapers were moderately tied to political parties and labor unions (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). Today, such ties are no longer in place, all national newspapers now being privately owned. Dutch journalists report remarkably high on professional autonomy, consider ‘adhering to professional ethics’ as highly important but also dependent on the specific situation, and perceive ‘reporting things as they are’ as the most important role while ‘conveying a positive image of political leadership’ is considered the least important one (Hermans, 2016).

In Iran, by contrast, in certain cases newspapers’ activity state can be regulated by reinforcement of law applied through the press court, and at times newspaper continuity can be interfered directly by application of governmental forces (Shahidi, 2007). Progressive and critical journalism have always been practiced and persisted in Iran even in challenging circumstances, and attempts to form journalism organizations, communities and educational programs with more formal support have been numerous and continuous and, in certain cases, supported by some of the subsequent governments. Initiatives of journalistic training stem from the thirties and fifties of the 20th century (Mohsenian Rad, 2009) with formal college-based education initiated in the mid-sixties in 1965 and restarted in the late eighties after the 1979 revolution. Ranji (2020) reports on a small-scale fieldwork study of Iranian journalists’ role perception, which is to “map onto a combination of adversarial advocate, detective watchdog, change agent, educator and informer” (p. 527).

Our study is motivated by reports from previous corpus studies showing that crime news texts from Dutch and Iranian national newspapers differ in textual structure and in linguistic and visual framing (Rafiee et al., 2017, 2021a, 2021b): For instance, while the Dutch crime news focuses on victims and uses few images, Iranian news tends to emphasize judicial actions with accompanying images. This raises the question addressed in the present paper namely whether, and if so, in which respects the discourse cultures of journalism may differ between these two cultural contexts. The present study analyzes instructions and assumptions behind writing first-hand news -with an additional focus on crime news-in recent and frequently applied Iranian and Dutch handbooks of journalism, with special attention to the textual structure, sentence formulation, and images in news discourse. We focus on crime news, a specific sub-genre on a highly judicialized topic, that is both intrinsically newsworthy in its universal human relevance, and culturally specific in its context and details.

Method

Corpus

Five Iranian and five Dutch handbooks of journalism were studied with a focus on the instructions for and observable assumptions about writing (crime) news (in press). These handbooks were selected on the basis of a query among journalism educational programs in Iran and The Netherlands, questioning which handbooks are currently most used for journalistic instructions (see Appendix 1); the query was conducted with instructors, (graduated) students and course modules as sources of information. Guided by the list of content and subject indexes and reading the handbooks, a content selection was made of instructions for and assumptions about news(writing), textual structure, formulating sentences, and preparing images, both regarding crime news in particular and first-hand (hard) news in general. The selected materials were considered as relevant data for coding and in-depth analysis.

Analysis and procedure

We conducted an inductive qualitative content analysis following a three-step procedure of Preparing, Organizing, and Reporting (Elo and Kyngas, 2008). The selected content of the handbooks were translated into English ¹ and imported into an Excel file where all coding was conducted. ²

Preparing was conducted in terms of familiarization with the data through reading and re-reading all data units. The whole corpus was content-analyzed with handbooks from each country as units of analysis, while sentences or thematic segments ³ were approached as units of coding. Each unit was coded as to which aspect, specificity and essence of preparing (crime) news it captured. Aspect refers to what aspect of preparing news the excerpt explained about: discourse structure, sentence formulation, image or “other”, where the latter referred to any aspect other than the first three. Specificity captures whether the excerpt explained about either crime news in particular or journalistic newswriting in general. Essence indicated whether the excerpt represented an instruction, an explicit convention on how to write news, or rather an assumed value or norm, that is, a normative conceptualization regarding news writing such as a reason behind the given instructions or a desired effect of certain styles.

Organizing included writing informal descriptions or limited interpretations of excerpt’s content, specifying patterns and overarching concepts, and clarifying the relation between and within assumptions and instructions in terms of reasons and motivations (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Elo and Kyngäs, 2008).

Reporting was conducted by explaining the discourse of handbooks following overarching themes and sub-concepts and the relation therein, pointing out few excerpts which were representative for the findings (see Appendix 2 for the latter). For accountability, the coding scheme used for the analysis, as well as the specific results of coding, categorization and abstraction, were checked for a sample of one hundred thematic segments (10 from each handbook). This was done in several sessions before, during, and after the analysis between the researchers and agreement was achieved in interaction (Graneheim and Lundman, 2004). ⁴

Findings

In each section below, the discourse of Iranian handbooks is offered after that of the Dutch handbooks. In Appendix 2, example excerpts are offered as representatives of the findings.

General journalistic handbook themes on newswriting

Dutch handbook themes: Informing the public

In general, the main function of journalism in the Dutch handbooks is informing the public about what is happening in the society; consequently, news is considered central to journalism and the informative function is the main function that journalism must fulfill. It seems that this emphasis on providing people with access to information and letting them make decisions and interpretations based on the information is highly linked to the central role that journalism can play in serving democracy. Two sub-themes follow this concept: the ‘audience preference’ and ‘speed in transferring the message’. Since news is for people, they have the right not only to receive information but also to receive it in the shortest possible time; also, the audience’s preference for what and how to receive news is important although too much emphasis on the latter can hurt the democratic function of journalism. Here, digitalization helps in transferring the news faster and knowing the public’s taste by offering the possibility to track audience preferences.

Specific newswriting conventions which Dutch handbooks address include emphasizing the news, audience comprehension, audience independency, and news immediacy. Focusing on the informative function of journalism, these handbooks emphasize the importance of offering citizens access to objective information (as opposed to interpreted one) and, through this, freedom to interpret the events based on that information. As such, media should not only inform the public about the news events as fast as possible but also emphasize the news even when people have already been informed about the events; also, the audience’s comprehension of news becomes particularly crucial, as understanding the news is a prerequisite for being informed about the news events. News immediacy is valued, meaning that the content and structure must be clear and contribute to the audience’s understanding of news events. Handbooks also stress audience independency, in that the public should be given the information about news events and not the journalist’s opinion, so that it can decide for themselves how to interpret the events.

The focus on reminding people of the news, considerable attention to audience comprehension, news immediacy and audience independency leads to a special status considered for news items (Dutch: “nieuwsberichten”), as the default journalistic genre, from which all sub-genres are derived; other journalistic genres used for communicating first-hand news should, like news items, be short, objective, clear in content and structure and informative.

Iranian handbook themes: Transformation from informing to increasing awareness

Two concepts shape the general discourse of news journalism in the Iranian handbooks: Transformation, and modern news journalism. In the recent past, a huge transformation has occurred in all aspects of news and this transformation is still ongoing. The cause of this vast and deep transformation is the complexity of current world events and the appearance of online media (Forghani, 2017; Shokrkhah, 2019). Online media, in particular, now fulfill the function of providing news as they inform people about events in the shortest possible time. Furthermore, the variety of forms present in online media has familiarized the audience with different forms and styles and affected their news taste (Shokrkhah, 2019). As a result, the readership of immediate news and, consequently, the survival of news media and in particular the press is highly threatened. Attempts to save (press) news journalism and convince audience to read news with more attractive newswriting styles have ended up in a version called modern news journalism (Shokrkhah, 2019).

Readership and increasing awareness are themselves two important sub-concepts in the overall discourse of Iranian news journalism; the former is conceptualized not only in terms of attention to news but also, and especially, in terms of reading the whole news text and following the news events. The two concepts have a reciprocal relation, meaning on the one hand that readership is the prerequisite for increasing awareness and on the other hand that news texts which help increasing awareness satisfy audience to read news and follow news events, as otherwise the audience can use online media for immediate access to the main facts. These two concepts act as determining factors for how news must be prepared. What links the ideals of modern news journalism to actual instructions for preparing the news is the new task of printed news, that is, elaborating on already-published news instead of merely informing audience about what happened. This conceptualization is in line with a desire to report the truth instead of to tell mere facts and leads to a preference for report as the ideal genre in modern journalism. The news report (Dutch: “nieuwsverslag”) is not only emphasized as the preferred genre, but seems to have replaced straight news especially in print media. This change in preferred genre results in a move from hard news toward soft news style, as the latter has the capacity to cover new forms of news. Similarly, soft-news style is considered as the appropriate style which suits modern journalism.

Moving from mere news to news reports and from hard-news to soft-news style imposes more flexibility into modern newswriting and highlights the significant role of professionalism, the ability to fulfil social responsibility through increasing audience’s awareness following principles of newswriting and gaining strength and capability in writing news reports. This concept shows high association with non-neutrality and non-formulaic writing. The first one includes being impartial and honest but at the same time not neutral; that is, the professional journalist should view news events with some perspective and offer that perspective to the readers. Non-formulaic writing maintains that the professional journalist must follow instructions and basic principles but not formulas, as the latter “kill creativity and innovation” (Tavakoli, 2016: p. 151; translation by the authors). Becoming professional in newswriting is only possible through gaining experience by writing, reading and knowing the audience; this also implies that beginners are expected to make more use of formulas and basic structures and styles.

Handbook approaches to news writing

Dutch handbooks’ approaches to newswriting: news as event & conventionalized writing

Two sub-themes follow from the main Dutch concepts in newswriting: Considering news as an event and following conventionalized writing. Treating news as an event puts the focus on giving information about the core facts; although news can be elaborated through follow-ups later (in case of importance of topic), this doesn’t seem to be the main concern. This emphasis on the core facts rather than detailed interpretation in turn links to the informative function of news, audience independency and comprehension and consequently speed of message creation and transferring. Conventionalized writing is characterized through a focus on making the internal and external aspects of the structure clear and evolves around the emphasis on genre constraints, fixed structures and formulas suggested for writing and structuring the content. They are believed to help the speed in writing and reading news, help clarify what the audience can expect and improve comprehension through guiding the audience to understand the news facts. The last two are the main sub-concepts in Dutch discourse of newswriting namely, ‘clarification’ and ‘audience expectation’; in sum, newswriting must be clear and match the expectations of the audience. Note that despite the emphasis on conventionalized writing, creativity is repeatedly mentioned as an important aspect of news writing; however, it is not explained exactly how creativity must be practiced but merely associated with rhetorical aspects such as (personal) point of view, choice of words, and genres used to elaborate on already-published news like background articles and reportage.

Iranian handbooks’ approaches to newswriting: Newswriting as generic storytelling

One central concept in the specific discourse of newswriting is treating newswriting as generic storytelling. This conceptualization is characterized through sub-concepts ‘familiarity with reporting’ and ‘following people’s habit in reporting daily news’, and is believed to lead to offering ‘natural and fluent’ news. Treating newswriting as generic storytelling evolves around three sub-concepts: focus on ‘news as process’, importance of ‘creativity’ and ‘practicality’ of news. All of these are then characterized through an emphasis on dramatic and narrative structure of news which affects instructions for all aspects of newswriting. Considering news as process and story also entails a need for creativity, mainly defined in terms of avoiding cliché styles and structures as they are old, boring and repetitive (Forghani, 2017; Tavakoli, 2016). The motivation behind these assumptions is to make news more practical, hoping that the practicality encourages audience to read news and leads to awareness. Practicality is itself a broad category evolving around two sub-groups: On the one hand it includes increasing enjoyment, impressiveness, entertainment, through attracting audience with the aim of helping them play their citizenship role; on the other hand, it includes easing comprehension and helping memorability for instance through evoking questions in readers’ minds. Naturally, the call for creativity and the permission for flexibility lead to a variety of possibilities in preparing suitable structures, styles and even images.

Handbooks’ instructions of news production: Discourse structure, writing and images

Dutch instructions for discourse structure

Immediacy and rollability are two of the main themes on discourse structure. Immediacy means offering the most important information right in the beginning of the text, which helps people to be informed immediately and to decide whether they like to continue reading the rest of the article. Thus, it helps comprehension and independency. Rollability is a result of two sub-themes: ‘the tendency for writing in a concise way’ and ‘relevance of the information, i.e., structuring from most to least important’, both of which help clarifying the structure for the readers. Immediacy lets people know what the news is right in the beginning and relevance clarifies which information is essential and which is less so. Hence, the inverted pyramid is highly valued.

Iranian instructions for discourse structure

Immediacy and circular structure shape the main concepts in the discussion of textual structure in Iranian handbooks; a circular structure is defined as a non-linear structure in which the last paragraph also includes important information and links to the beginning of the news text (Shokrkhah, 2019; Tavakoli, 2016). These are needed so to respond to the need of the impatient audience as well as the traditional editors by, respectively, giving the most important or attractive factors in the beginning, and allow for elaboration of the topic. The desire to fulfill both of these functions led to the invention of hybrid structures (e.g., chronological plus lead) and the hourglass structure, the latter being the result of creativity in combining inverted and narrative structures (Tavakoli, 2016: p. 152–153 for more details). Other discourse structures are also suggested for news: Inverted, chronological, hybrid style (i.e., chronological plus lead), wine glass, hourglass, Wall Street Journal formula, ⁵ surprise ending, section and list technique. Although different criteria such as the news topic or media can affect the choice of structure, inverted, pyramid and hybrid are suggested as basic structures suitable for simple topics and useful for the beginners; what completes these is creativity and innovation, which ask for advanced structures that are suitable for complicated topics and is highly associated with professionalism.

Although Iranian handbooks tend to be in agreement, there exist few disagreements. For instance, while Forghani (2017) indicates that immediacy and informing about mere facts in giving news are not relevant in modern (press) news journalism and that modern news is about elaborated non-immediate news reports, Badii and Ghandi (2016) put emphasis on the importance of these factors even in printed news reports, although it is a less important factor than in online news. Similarly, while Shokrkhah (2009) recommends the inverted pyramid for reporting news with the argument that this structure resembles people’s day-to-day talking about news facts, Forghani (2017) uses the same argument for putting more emphasis on the chronological structure.

Dutch instructions for writing

Instructions and assumptions for writing news are shaped around three categories: content, quality and criteria for determining these. For content, emphasized is that precise information of core facts must be included. These are believed to be rather fixed and complete when the text answers to the journalistic 5WH questions. Although the why is regarded as an important element in today’s journalism, the reason and manner (how) are considered less important than the information on who, what, when and where.

Regarding quality, comprehensibility and readability are the main themes: Texts should be written such that information is comprehensible through making the text as easily readable as possible, applying objectivity, concreteness and simplicity. Genre and topic are important criteria for content and quality, which, in certain cases, allow for some deviation from the main instructions on what to include in a news text and how to formulate the information. For instance, if a topic is more important, details are permitted; similarly, in follow-ups on news items, complementary information is allowed (Bekius, 2003).

Iranian instructions for writing

The specific discourse of writing news texts can be defined in terms of instructions and assumptions for two main categories: content and quality. Content of news should allow for comprehensiveness and telling the truth instead of summarizing mere facts. This can be achieved through providing answer to all of the journalistic questions, different layers of those questions, the hidden aspects, mentioning not only the key facts but also the complementary information and background to hard news with a focus on why and how, including other people’s perspectives, characters and emotions, personal observations, conflicts, contrasts and reasoning. At the same time, the included information must be relevant, up-to-date, correct, practical and based on research and the need of the audience.

With respect to quality, apart from being impartial, newswriting must match the audience’s education level, ease of readability also for a not-so-focused audience and must help the audience to draw conclusions by being lively, accurate, realistic, simple, concise, offering in-depth news, and utilizing description, explanation and illustration. The most important detailed instructions on language use advocate the use of non-cliché style, of strong but not formal lexical terms and quotations as well as of transitions, metaphors, literary expressions, anecdotes and repetitions throughout the text (as hooks) when needed. Quotations, in particular, are considered to symbolize transformation and represent circular structure. All of these help elaborate on news and achieve the ideal function of increasing audience’s awareness.

Dutch instructions for images

The dominant idea in Dutch handbooks is that images help improving the informative function of the news. Thus, they should be used, although limiting factors such as the genre, the topic and the length of the text which they accompany must also be taken into account; genres that should include photos are news stories and news articles. Two highly related themes about the use of images are immediate production and helping better comprehension. Images help informing audience in a shorter amount of time about the events as they need shorter time to be prepared compared to news texts. Furthermore, images help increase comprehension of the news events by the audience. Images also have a remarkable role in improving the informative function of the texts further, because they help the news text to be read and get published because of their high attention value compared to words. In order to achieve that goal, news images must be clear and offer complementary information; this helps telling in-depth and readable stories (Bekius, 2003; Donkers et al., 2010; Kussendrager et al., 2018)

Iranian instructions for images

According to the Iranian handbooks images play a central role in modern news journalism. Images are not only complementary to verbal text, but they are also necessary and inevitable in objectifying news events, in responding to audience expectations for viewing accompanying images in news articles and in making news memorable (Badii and Ghandi, 2016: p. 361). Some even go further by claiming that “images are replacing words” [translation by the authors] in the modern world and similarly in modern news journalism (Shokrkhah, 2009: p. 28). Similar to the instructions for verbal aspects of news, the instructions for news images also mention certain criteria as well as some flexibility; while the more strict criteria apply to the quality of images, truthfulness and respecting rights, the call for flexibility replaces strictness in the type of images allowed. Accordingly, news images must represent high news values and quality in terms of clarity, be interesting through representing the physically or emotionally ‘mobile’ subject; the latter is supposed to be conveyed through body posture and facial expression. Other categories of press images are defined as: immediate images, non-immediate and archival photos, decorative image and horrifying images; regarding editing of the images, montage and collage are considered as possibilities, although not highly recommended for news images (Badii and Ghandi, 2016, chapter 7).

Crime news

Dutch crime news & the value of the inverted pyramid

Crime news is not much focused on in Dutch handbooks. It is only discussed in some detail in Asbreuk et al. (2017), gets a mention in Bekius (2003), and a marginal mention in Kussendrager et al. (2018). Furthermore, it is not so much considered a serious news topic as rather a popular one (Asbreuk et al., p. 141–142). The function of crime news seems to be in line with the function of news about other topics, namely, to inform the audience about event and process; thus, crime news must include precise information and follow conventions in structuring the text. Regard content, what happened, when and where make up the main content, while the reason (why) and manner (how) behind the events need less emphasis. Inverted structure is suggested, as it better serves the informative function. Asbreuk et al. (2017) offer a fixed structure for which content to include and how to structure the included information, while suggesting the journalist to also try some flexibility; the latter is not explained (p. 156–157). The suggested genres for crime news are news item (Dutch: “nieuwsbericht”) and court report, the former to be used for informing about for instance judicial sentences. Asbreuk et al. (2017) refer to news items as default genre for crime news, although they add that crime cases with interesting personal or judicial aspects are increasingly trending towards genres which allow for more interpretation and also mention the influence of soft news in this process (Asbreuk et al., 2017: p. 158). Finally, photos are considered as an element of news reports on incidents (Bekius, p. 43), although this is not emphasized in most of the handbooks.

Iranian crime news and the value of dramatic structure

Crime news is considered as a sub-genre of news reports that is often considered part of the category of incidents and accidents news, and is itself divided into different sub-genres (i.e., reports of crime events, reports of court and trial sessions, report of police findings and reports of punishment) with, sometimes, different instructions (Badii and Ghandi, 2016; Forghani, 2017; Shokrkhah, 2009; Tavakoli, 2016). Two main concepts seem to shape the discourse of crime news in Iranian handbooks: crime news as a special sub-genre, and the value of dramatic structure. Treating crime as a special sub-genre of news (reports) comes from two assumptions which shape the sub-concepts: ‘High audience attraction’ and the ‘contradictory functions’ that crime news can potentially fulfill in society, that is, preferably, educating citizens so as to help prevent future criminal incidents initiated by others, and, possibly, showing citizens how crimes are committed so as to enable them to act likewise themselves (Badii and Ghandi, 2016; Forghani, 2017). Accordingly, crime news “is one of the most attractive news reports” by nature as it embraces one of the most important news values, namely conflict (Forghani, 2017: p. 68), and for the human aspect inherent in crime and crime-related events (such as arrests and trials). These two factors lead to attracting different audiences to such news; consequently, crime news, unlike some other sub-genres, is highly read and followed by a huge number of interested audiences. Although the press can benefit from such a high readership, crime news faces other challenges with respect to newswriting and publication due to its contradictory functions.

Logically, how crime news must be prepared is in line with the desired function it should serve. Besides following the general newswriting principles such as creativity and truthfulness, the preventive function can be achieved through the use of a dramatic structure with a focus on the setting and the atmosphere; more specific instructions can vary depending on the sub-genre. The basic textual structure for incidents and accidents news is the hybrid structure, i.e., lead plus chronological structure (following the sequence of the dialogues, for court reports) (Badii and Ghandi, 2016; Shokrkhah, 2009), but chronological structure, inverted pyramid, hourglass structure and Wall Street Journal formula (for crime news with descriptive nature) are also suggested (Forghani, 2017; Tavakoli, 2016).

With respect to linguistic framing, explaining Why and How of events, after explaining What, is important as it increases the audience’s awareness about the underlying reasons for crime events. Specific value is attached to the inclusion of complementary information, expert’s views, relevant statistics, details of conflicts and paradoxes, emotions, effects of crime and crime-related events on humans, and explanation of the atmosphere; and these must be written in precise, artful, illustrative and realistic way. Regarding images, crime news should benefit from images to inform and educate. Simultaneously, journalists must not make use of photos expressing very tragic moments of human suffering, although no specific instruction is given about when an image must be considered “too tragic” (Badii and Ghandi, 2016).

Conclusion and discussion

The comparison of Dutch and Iranian handbooks demonstrates that Dutch handbooks consider informing the primary function of news while the Iranian handbooks consider informing as less important, and emphasize that news should bring awareness. This difference also explains why the Dutch handbooks are more positive about the emergence of online media: the affordances of social media help informing citizens in the shortest possible time, and hence social media can contribute to the primary function of informing. By contrast, the Iranian handbooks are more critical about social media. They emphasize the rather shallow image of the actual events that online media provide to their audience which also imposes a big change to function of journalism and printed newswriting. In the light of these differences, it is understandable that the Dutch handbooks encourage the use of news items while the Iranian handbooks promote the use of forms of ‘slow journalism’ like reports. The difference in focus between the Iranian and Dutch handbooks must be viewed in relation to the difference in context: Iranian journalism is practiced in a constitutional context where journalism has historically been challenged to adapt in order to function and survive, (Shahidi, 2007). Dutch journalism, by contrast, is historically developed in a context where providing objective information to citizens is considered essential and even beneficial for society – although in recent years, the objectivity of journalism itself is challenged by some parts of the public, as is the case in many other Western countries (Hameleers, 2022).

Considering the findings, it seems that both sets of handbooks consider newswriting as a ‘service’ aimed at improving the citizens’ life, although one aims at doing so by informing them about the facts and the other one through increasing their awareness by telling them the truth; Dutch handbooks seem to observe journalism as a ‘profession’ and represents an industry model of journalism education (Mensing, 2010), while the Iranian ones tend to emphasize ‘journalism as storytelling’ (Zelizer, 2017). The high emphasis of the Dutch handbooks on well-informed citizens, objectivity and audience’s autonomy in their interpretation of news events seems to correlate with democratic values; the focus of Iranian handbooks on increasing audience’s awareness through the use of different creative styles and structures could reflect a desire by Iranian journalists to practice ‘critical journalism’ given the existing tensions between journalists and the state (Badii and Ghandi, 2016; Forghani, 2017; Ranji, 2020). Based on our findings, we conclude that Iranian journalism is conceptualized more as a “mission to enlighten the public masses/nation” rather than “a profession aimed at informing the public”, at least in the scholarly discourse of journalism as present in the handbooks (cf. Shahidi, 2006: p. 27). In addition, it could be presumed that Iranian journalism is conceptualized as a rather narrative enterprise – which, given the tendency toward narrative journalism in recent years (Ray, 2013; Van Krieken and Sanders, 2016), could lead to the conclusion that Iranian handbooks are rather more up-to-date than Dutch handbooks.

Previous studies show that the conceptualization of basic principles such as ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ can vary across time and culture (Donsbach and Klett, 1993; Parks, 2018); our findings show that variation can also be observed in the proposed ideal functions of news, the role of digitalization, stylistic choices and the importance of concepts such as creativity. Thus, while some concepts may be more universal albeit with different interpretations (e.g., immediacy in informing, benefits of digitalization, readability), the main assumptions and instructions can be highly culture-specific. Although the findings from this and previous studies show differences between Dutch and Iranian journalism practices and values (also Rafiee et al., 2017, 2021a, 2021b), we believe that in order to find out to what extent the discourse in Dutch and the Iranian handbooks represent different conceptualizations of the notion ‘journalism’, diachronic analyses are needed to trace the path that journalism and newswriting has passed in each of these cultural contexts. For now, we limit ourselves to the conclusion that it does not seem to be the case that journalistic instructions and assumptions can be transferred from the west to the east unproblematically; rather, when these are transferred, they are to be reflected upon critically, and crafted for use in the target context (see Bromley et al., 2001).

The high tendency of Iranian journalists to use crime news images, the dominance of hybrid structures and the emphasis on officials and judicial acts as well as lengthy news articles, as reported in previous studies of Iranian and Dutch crime news (Rafiee et al., 2017, 2021a, 2021b), all seem to relate to the tendency of Iranian journalism to use a dramatic structure for reporting news events and to fulfill a preventive function in reporting crime. Although the preventive function defined for crime report is regarded as the optimal function of crime news in the handbooks, the way it emerges in news reports – focusing on judicial actions such as arrest and trial rather than context and social causes of crime – may well be the result of Iranian governmental control over media and the dominance of the state’s normative perspective; and this would be in line with the policies of the state in treating crime and performing punishments. Such observations could show the complexity of the network of ‘context’ as an amalgamation of highly intertwined social and cultural factors.

Our analysis was limited in several respects. A first limitation is the use of only a limited set of handbooks used in journalism curricula and only those parts that were considered relevant to the scope of the present study. Furthermore, we need to study more contextual factors, in order to get a complete picture of the differences between the two discourse cultures. For instance, it would be relevant to extend our study to the practice of journalism education, and study how the discourse of handbooks is mirrored by ways in which journalism students are actually taught and evaluated, and how this differs between the two cultures. Finally, how the conceptualization of journalism and instructions on newswriting has changed over time and how this relates to the social context in each period, is another important topic for future diachronic studies of handbooks and other relevant documents (Parks, 2018).