News text on fire extinguishing service

Abstract

This article examined news text on fire extinguishing of Kupang city, Indonesia. The text was taken from Timor Express newspaper. The examination was to analyze its macrostructure, superstructure, microstructure and to describe the cognition and social context. We collected data by taking the news texts of Timor Express purposively. Additionally, we interviewed the editorial chief of the electronic mass media of the Timor Express to verify the data and to reach a deep understanding of the cognition and social contexts that implicitly realized in the news text construction. Results showed that the text structure of Kupang City fire extinguishing service in Timor Express news consists of macro-structure, super-structure, and microstructure. For the level of the superstructure, in general, Timor Express formulates headlines followed by leads consisting of script elements, which can be identified as: ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘who’ elements. Meanwhile, elements ‘why’ and ‘how’ are in the news content (story). A macrostructure is a thematic form of the Kupang city fire extinguishing service news text. The microstructure consists of semantics, syntactic, stylistic, rhetoric. In the microstructure, the use of words that pointed to, or reinforced news messages about the fire disaster was investigated. In terms of social cognition, the aspect is realized in the form of journalists' mental awareness of a fire disaster that received services from the Kupang City fire service department. Timor Express journalists considered that fire is an unpredictable humanitarian disaster which impacts material losses in life.