This paper theorizes a model for the representation of risks in online news media.
Its practicability is demonstrated using Malaysian alternative online newspapers.
Anxiety and uncertainty about a risk event are naturally rooted in discourse and
count as discursive event because they appear on the discourse planes of politics
and the media intensively and extensively. These discourses are pervasive on the
Internet, which is used by over 20 million Malaysians. Furthermore, alternative
newspapers flourish in online forms in Malaysia largely due to government press
law inhibitions on mainstream print and broadcast media. The popularity of
alternative online newspapers in Malaysia is also demonstrated by their ranking
within the first three most visited web entities in the April 2015 Media Metrix
rankings of Malaysian web entities. The model is used to provide presumptions
on how risks can be spread or weakened. It also provides conjectures on how
multiple semiotic resources in the composition, content and design of online
news media like colour, gesture, image, layout, writing, etc can be used to amplify
or attenuate risks from meanings that are conveyed using “tools shaped by cultural
and social factors to mediate interests of members of social groups…” Thus, the
model proposes a digital social amplification of risk communication model on
the role of the news media in the representation of risks, and in negotiating
socio-cognitive processes, behaviours and responses to risk events.