  In the contemporary media landscape, with the vast and diverse supply of
news, it is increasingly challenging to study such an enormous amount of items
without a standardized framework. Although attempts have been made to organize
and compare news items on the basis of news values, news genres receive little
attention, especially the genres in a news consumer's perception. Yet,
perceived news genres serve as an essential component in exploring how news has
developed, as well as a precondition for understanding media effects. We
approach this concept by conceptualizing and operationalizing a non-discrete
framework for mapping news items in terms of genre cues. As a starting point,
we propose a preliminary set of dimensions consisting of "factuality" and
"formality". To automatically analyze a large amount of news items, we deliver
two computational models for predicting news sentences in terms of the said two
dimensions. Such predictions could then be used for locating news items within
our framework. This proposed approach that positions news items upon a
multidimensional grid helps in deepening our insight into the evolving nature
of news genres.
