Local and Global Identity on News Sites: Al Jazeera’s English-language Website

The chapter arises from a teaching experience with first-year Italian undergraduates of a Communication Science course, which implies working intensely with Internet resources. While students appear to be comfortable with the digital environment, their awareness of the theory of the mediated nature of web communication is quite limited. In addition, given the fast-changing quality of websites themselves and, consequently, the lack of suitable course books, teachers need to constantly redesign and update their own syllabus if they want to explore meaningful and relevant digital content. This effort inevitably problematizes identity – of producers and audiences – as well as the nature of textual representation. A suitable case study of the tensions arising from local and global notions of identity in news discourse and involving the role of English as lingua franca, is provided by the recently relaunched Al Jazeera’s English-language website, a digital presence which confirms the network’s status as a global media player alongside CNN and the BBC. The exploration of the visual/verbal content of this website, by means of an interdisciplinary approach combining multimodal discourse analysis and media studies, offers stimulating insights into the semiotic organization of a “glocalized” multimodal text whose controversial news discourse challenges ready-made notions of ethnic, cultural and political identity, while trying to reach a global audience.