This chapter outlines a range of approaches that altogether consider media discourse from numerous theoretical and methodological vantage points, examining discourse structure, representation, ideology, pragmatic and social‐semiotic meaning, sociolinguistic variation, ethnographic understanding, mediatization processes, and involvement with audience and society. It problematizes the extent to which our understanding of “the media” involves more than the traditional journalistic avenues of news and advertising in print, broadcast, and online modalities, particularly with the omnipresence of new media, social media, and mobile technology. Standard “audience” models are yielding to changes in practice as users generate content, news outlets encourage “interactivity,” and the professional role of the new‐media‐oriented journalist changes. At the same time, news narratives reflect both stable and emergent ideologies within local and global cultures, hearkening to the historical past, and on the textual level incorporate visual and interactional elements that enhance their multimodal transformations in the digital age