Live online news : From content presentation to interactive co-participation
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Traditional journalism is governed by such news values as recency and topicality, requiring that recipients are offered news that is as ‘fresh’ as possible. In live news formats, these values become absolute because the event is reported as it unfolds in real time. Live news thus achieves a compression of time between the occurrence of a news event and its mediatized presentation. The simultaneity has a significant impact on the form of the media message. This paper deals with the specificities of live online news, i.e. journalistic accounts of unfolding events produced in the written mode. Based on an extensive data set of live news from British online newspapers, the paper highlights the specific narrative structure of these ‘news texts in progress’ and identifies several types of live news. It maps some of its differences from traditional ‘post-event’ news reports as well as from spoken live news broadcasts. Adopting a broad pragmatic perspective on the data, the paper focuses on the shift from the presentation of content in traditional news stories towards the role of interactivity in live online news. It is argued that the extensive interactive potential is one of the key features of live online news, which clearly sets it apart from other formats of media reporting. As a result, the recipients of live news texts may choose to become directly involved by means of not only commenting but also gathering, mediating and remediating the news. This interactive nature of live news leads to the necessity to rethink the participation frameworks of these communicative encounters because of the changing role of the audience from recipients to potential co-authors. |
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