University Image Building through Online News Reports

摘要

Currently, Indonesia is managing more than 4,397 higher education institutions (HEIs), eleven of which are pushed to meet the international standards. One of the standards is the presence of international students and international faculty staffs. These two indicators are also used by the ministry to rank the universities, with some incentives for those in the top rank. The universities then respond by inviting more foreign students and more partnerships with universities abroad. For this purpose, they publicize their achievement in their websites. The objective of this article is to examine how Indonesian HEIs present themselves to their potential students and partners through the news they published in their websites. The analysis is focused on how the positive attitudes are presented in the news reports. The data for the study were a corpus news reports published in the websites of Universitas Sebelas Maret, Universitas Gadjah Mada, and Universitas Indonesia. The theoretical framework adopted for the qualitative analysis in this study is that of appraisal (Martin & White, 2005) that develops from Martin and Rose (2003). The findings show that while all the reports seem to aim at presenting the achievement of the universities, they have different ways of doing so. Besides, the degrees of the appraisal or evaluation also vary between one university and the others. While, news report is only one of the ways to attract more students and partnerships, this study suggests that universities need an established journalist team so that they can present the positive image of universities through all the journalistic media available.