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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
newswriting itself must take account of these premises and that one is thus dealing
with pieces that are conceived as nodes to be incorporated into changing structures
and that are, therefore, more a linked and linkable news story rather than a closed
discourse. It is hardly necessary to say that such news pieces can be of many types,
not only textual, and that video has been playing a fundamental role in this respect
since 2006.
The hypothesis is set out in a relational way, because two variables are associated: the
change in organisation implies changes in the presentation of the message, and vice
versa. Whether one is only dealing with a causal relation, or with a mere simple
relation, is what our research, which will continue until the end of 2012, will attempt to
determine.
This is a study that will include different types of research. Prior to the application of the
methods stated here, we carried out a descriptive study of the phenomena of online
journalism in Spain, which benefited from the results of several prior coordinated
studies. The study is intended to be comparative and analytical, based on measuring
different variables. The results will enable us to show our students what news stories
on Internet are and it therefore also has a practical side.
We are thus trying to explain how news stories are constructed and presented in the
digital setting, starting with a narratological study that takes account of different
currents, starting with the great names of the discipline: Vladimir Propp, Mikhail
Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette or Claude Bremond, and,
more recently and more clearly adscribed to the study of narration, Mieke Bal or
Manfred Jahn.
Similarly, we are attempting to explain, through a study of the narrative elements
present not only in the hypertextual structure of the news as a whole, but also of the
itineraries that join the different nodes and the nodes considered individually, the
mechanisms of cohesion and hypertextual coherence. The Norwegian professor Martin
Engebretsen is a point of reference, since it is to him that we owe the distinction
between intranodal, internodal and structural coherence (Engebretsen, 2000). Although
we are not in agreement on one point: “His [Martin Engebretsen's] focus is more on the
possibilities of hypertextuality and on what online could or should look like, rather than
on actual practice”; we are attempting to do the opposite (Erdal, 2007: 56-57).
Narratology
Narratology is the discipline that analyses the narrative text, “in which a narrative agent
tells a story” (Bal, 2009: 15). Narratological analysis tries to understand both the
content, what is told (the story) and the form in which it is told, the fable. If news
stories, basically and although they can include descriptive or even dialogic elements,
are a narration, then aspects like the voice, the narrative situation, the form, time or the
characters can be analysed and typologised just as they are in any other narrative
expression. Following authors like Mieke Bal or Manfred Jahn, we would also like to
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