The ‘biographic footnote’ and the constitution of authorship in newspaper articles

Abstract

This study aims at observing the constitution of authorship in newspaper articles when this constitution is produced by the article writers themselves, especially through the working out modes of ‘biographic footnotes’. The corpus is composed of articles published in the newspapers O Dia, Meio Norte and Diário do Povo, all of which circulate in the Brazilian states of Maranhão and Piauí. Two regularities emerged from the researched materials: the fact that the same author creates different ‘biographical footnotes’ for his/her signed articles and the occurrence of ‘biographic footnotes’ containing data that emerge from and refer to the texts themselves. The constitution of authorship, as seen in the articles studied, points out to cultural traces of the social place where the newspapers circulate, one of the most important of them being the high value given to the academic degrees held by the article writers.