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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
prepared, that is, into its characteristics as text (as hypertext if you prefer, as we
explain in another communication) and, at the same time, into what its production
routines are. The second part of this research, which is developed in parallel with the
first, employs ethnographic methods, which are basically structured or semi-structured
interviews focussing on the agents involved in the production strategies of the news
material of online media. All of this without ignoring, as far as possible, the application
of other methods such as non-participatory observation or even surveys, which are not
however always easy to apply 20 . This tendency certainly involves a change in the focus
on the phenomenon of so-called online journalism, which, as David Domingo shows in
his doctoral thesis and in his book Making Online News, has passed from a first stage,
which placed a certain trust in the possibilities of digital language, to another in which
research is done into how and why news strategy is designed in newsrooms. The two
lines of research are not mutually exclusive, on the contrary, they are complementary,
and in fact both coexist in the abovementioned research group.
With respect to the analysis of the discourse itself – what the distinctive characteristics
of online news stories are, and whether it is possible on this basis to establish some
type of textual typology, prior to any taxonomic discussion about online journalistic
genres – we have employed a strategy of analysis from several points of view: a
content analysis of a classical type in order to determine which themes are present in
these items (samples are analysed in the form of an artificial week, in three waves
separated by periods of six months between them, of 15 Spanish media and 15 foreign
media in different languages); a narratological analysis (the possibility of widening this
with a rhetorical analysis is envisaged, as we shall see); an analysis of thematic and
mythical recurrences; a pragmastylistic analysis; and, especially since we are dealing
with characteristics specific to digital discourse, an analysis of multimedial – in reality,
basically video – and hypertextual elements, which are the subject of another
communication that tries to establish what the grammar of the hyperlink is and to what
point hypertextual structures set out their elements according to certain parameters
(similar or not to the parts of the news story as discourse that was researched in the
1980s by Teun A. van Dijk); and an analysis of interactivity, probably the thorniest
concept of them all. Years ago several works by professor van Dijk analysed news as
discourse. Since then some considerable changes have occurred. For example, the
already mentioned extension of multimedial and hypertextual properties applied to
current news, which is updated and completed insofar as the news flow takes place,
not according to the rhythms of production of the media. The way in which news is
presented is also mutating, very deeply I believe. The discourse still retains many of
the characteristics that van Dijk explored in the 1980s, but others have been
incorporated. Van Dijk himself has always called for multidisciplinary studies and thus,
in his book Handbook of Discourse Analysis, he tried to bring together researchers
from several European universities to present one of the most impressive and complete
analysis of the news story from several points of view, from rhetoric to pragmatics, from
20 In this respect, see the experience of an earlier research group in which I was involved, whose final monograph
reflects the advances and difficulties in the application of these methods for measuring media convergence in Spain
(López and Pereira, 2010).
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