Journalism In The 20th Century

Since its beginnings, journalism has played an important role in spreading news, ideas and stories across cities, countries and continents. It has heavily influenced politics, economics, as well as everyday life of common people. However, journalism was not always as objective and free source of information as it is nowadays (Although it is debatable to what extent are journalists a valid source of information even today). In Britain, throughout the history various press censorship laws had been implemented, thus restricting the content and distribution of all religious and political printed publications. This caused the first newspaper in English language to be published in Amsterdam in 1620. However, the first true English newspapers are

The turn of the 20th century brought various major changes, one of the most significant is the Digital Revolution which marked the century as the Information Age. The news industry as one of mass media elements made newspapers accessible to large audiences via internet. From the 1980s on, the online world pervaded in all spheres life. According to the research conducted in 2016 there are 3.6 billion internet users which makes 49.5% of world population. Today, unlike ever before, press companies have a possibility of reaching such an immense readership with their online versions of newspapers. Considering that through the use of mass media people can find the latest news faster and according to their interest it is no surprise that printed publications are getting replaced by the online versions of

Under the umbrella of rules for omitting certain parts of speech, which are normally required in Standard English language, the most frequently used ones are the omission of articles (definite and indefinite), omission of the verb ‘’to be’’, omission of auxiliary verbs, omission of ‘’to say’’ in reported speech etc. The striking feature of the grammar of the newspaper headlines is the peculiar use of tenses. For example, the present tense is consistently used in headlines for the past events, to-infinitive form is used to refer to some future events etc. In order to save space, journalist often replace longer words for shorter synonyms, e.g. ‘back’ is often used instead of ‘support’, ‘bond’ for ‘’political or business association’’, ‘’act’’ for ‘’to take action’’, ‘’bar’’ for ‘’refuse’’, ‘’slam’’ for ‘’heavily criticize’’ etc. Furthermore, lexis is intended to be dramatic and striking to create a catchy headline. These are only some of the many stylistic and linguistic features of the grammar of the newspaper headlines. In this bachelor thesis I will focus on analyzing the frequency of only some of those linguistic peculiarities of newspaper headlines which already briefly mentioned in the