The time spans in the chapters have been distributed according to (a) historical key moments in the process of news-writing changes, and (b) extant computerized corpora covering such periods, thereby permitting specific linguistic analyses. Indeed, each chapter makes use of a set of corpora specifically devised to suit the needs of scholars studying the periods under scrutiny.
The topics discussed and the corpora exploited to analyze them call into question basic methodological issues that are tackled from different perspectives in the book, while the epicentre of all research remains the news itself, in a continuous process of adjustment and renewal.
Nicholas Brownlees is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Florence, Italy. He has written extensively on early modern news and is the author of The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth-Century England (2011). He is also editor of News Discourse in Early Modern Britain (2006) and co-editor of The Language of Public and Private Communication in a Historical Perspective (2010).
Birte Bös is currently Guest Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and has worked as a Junior Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Rostock. Her research interests include synchronic and diachronic pragmatics, discourse analysis and media linguistics. Based on the Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC), which is currently being extended, she has investigated the communicative practices of historical and modern news discourse.
Udo Fries was Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, until his retirement in 2007. He has published widely in the fields of English philology, syntax and text linguistics. In recent years he has concentrated on work in computer corpus linguistics, producing ZEN (The Zurich English Newspaper Corpus), a corpus of 17th- and 18th-century English newspapers.