Wondering what the future holds: A testable and replicable approach to coding and identifying future-oriented guesses in journalism

This article proposes a testable method for identifying guesses on future events in news journalism. By combining linguistic theories on speech acts and non-reality, the article seeks to bring clarity on the fuzzy concepts of guessing, conjecturing, predicting and speculating which have previously (Jaworski et al. 2003, Neiger 2007) been handled as presupposed and, to some extent, undefined categories, although they are often hard to distinguish from each other and from other speech acts dealing with future events. This leads to a set of operationalized definitions which are tested for intercoder reliability (Krippendorff’s α = 0.88) on a case corpus (n = 1939 sentences). The article concludes by emphasizing the necessity of elaborate definitions and a testing device when dealing with speech acts in content analysis.