Playing with environmental stories in the news - good or bad practice?

The aim of this article is to analyse environmental reporting in the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. The focus is on a particular kind of new, multisemiotic news story genre that appears regularly in this newspaper, and that makes use of word-image play. Using a social semiotic framework and employing Appraisal theory, we analyse a corpus of 40 stories in terms of evaluative meanings in heading, image and caption, and interpret the significance of our findings in terms of both Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis. In particular, we question whether the playing with environmental stories in the news, and the resulting clash between the humorousness of the play and the seriousness of the reported environmental event, is good or bad practice. With its multisemiotic focus, this article aims to make a significant and innovative contribution to the emerging field of ecolinguistics, and the development of Appraisal theory.