Roberta Facchinetti is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Verona, Italy. Her main research fields focus on media linguistics, language description and pragmatics, with special reference to how language is used to negotiate social and discourse roles. This is done mostly by means of computerized corpora of both synchronic and diachronic English. On the subject she has authored, co-authored and edited various books and articles, among which are Corpus Linguistics 25 Years On (2007) and From International to Local English – And Back Again (2010) with David Crystal and Barbara Seidlhofer.Nicholas Brownlees is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Florence, Italy. He has written extensively on early modern news and is the author of The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth-Century England (2011). He is also editor of News Discourse in Early Modern Britain (2006) and co-editor of The Language of Public and Private Communication in a Historical Perspective (2010).Birte Bös is currently Guest Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and has worked as a Junior Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Rostock. Her research interests include synchronic and diachronic pragmatics, discourse analysis and media linguistics. Based on the Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC), which is currently being extended, she has investigated the communicative practices of historical and modern news discourse.Udo Fries was Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, until his retirement in 2007. He has published widely in the fields of English philology, syntax and text linguistics. In recent years he has concentrated on work in computer corpus linguistics, producing ZEN (The Zurich English Newspaper Corpus), a corpus of 17th- and 18th-century English newspapers.