News stories have a well-defined generic structure, consisting of components such as headline, lede, and body, with reported speech a prominent feature, especially in hard news stories. Reported speech serves multiple purposes, from providing evidentiality and intertextuality to contributing to the construction of newsworthiness and to the context creation of news. It is also a site of potential bias in who is cited and how, including with respect to the gender of sources. Using a large corpus of English-language news stories for all of 2023 from the main five mainstream news outlets in Canada (over 370,000 articles from news websites), I examine the gender distribution of those quoted, the syntactic variation in the structure of quotes, and the types of reporting verbs. The study provides a comprehensive overview of the extend of gender bias in contemporary Canadian news, at the same time offering insights into the nature of reported speech in modern news and how it endures and evolves, including in news meant for digital-only publication.

'A global community of health for all' has become a dominant concept in China's global health governance system. Although this concept has been investigated by several studies in different domains, little attention has been given to its discursive legitimation in China's media communication from a linguistic perspective. To fill this gap, the present study employs positive discourse analysis to investigate how the aforementioned concept is legitimised via the predominant discourses associated with COVID-19 in state-run Chinese English-language newspapers. The findings show that the Chinese news media attempted to formulate the positive discourses, including cooperation as a win-win solution, people's lives and well-being as the priority and science as the spirit, though the discourses may not resonate with some countries. The findings shed light on the use of language by the media in promoting official ideologies, projecting China's national image and improving China's international relations amid a global health crisis.

Facebook remains the most important platform where social media editors package and try to 'sell' media outlets' online news articles to audiences. In one of the first studies of its kind, we assess how this practice was effectuated during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use computational analysis to determine the polarity, subjectivity and use of some linguistics features in the status messages of 140,359 Facebook posts of 17 mainstream and alternative news titles from Flanders (Belgium) between March 2020 and 2021. Among other things, we find that status messages score considerably higher than headlines in terms of polarity and subjectivity, and that they, along with the use of question and interrogation marks, peaked in the first months of the pandemic. We contextualise our findings within existing scholarship and wider trends in increasingly digitised and globalised media societies.