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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
bandwidth, and because of production being labour-intensive and expensive, too
(López, 2005: 464-465; Salaverría & Cores, 2005: 167).
Based on analysis of several news websites, Micó and Masip (2008: 103) state that the
quantity of videos in Spanish online media has increased in recent years, even if video
still plays a subsidiary role, with the purpose to support the text, contextualize or show
what is difficult to express with words, and not as part of a multimedia storytelling effort.
As a result of innovations in how multimedia types and interactive functions are
combined, formats become more relevant, as opposed to legacy genres inherited from
print or newspaper journalism. Nevertheless, these typologies keep their status as
frameworks for journalistic production and consumption, in the sense that if journalists
follow certain codes, readers, viewers or users will know what to expect from them:
reporting, analysis, advocacy. This raises the need to update this classifications to
integrate the most recent instances of new media forms.
The connections between media platforms and the genres that occur within them have
been broadly analyzed. According to Palacios & Díaz Noci (2009: 23), reseachers
assume that the medium defines the units of discourse, to such an extent that it is
taken for granted. In television news, text is only complementary or subordinated to the
images, and is best kept short (Armentia & Caminos, 2009: 107-108). Splitting content
up and linking it are basics in Bradshaw’s principles for online journalism (2008), be it
in text or video form, in order to achieve both brevity and depth. This complexity will be
generally more suited to feature-style stories (Larrondo, 2009: 155-156).
As the boundaries between news, information and entertainment are blurred,
“Each Web genre has specific demands and production needs. Some mimic TV
formats such as news and talk shows, often with a twist, a new approach, or a new
point of view. Others are unique to the Web, like the growing library of short, visual
how-to and educational videos showing up on many popular sites. There are also
dramas, documentaries, and oral histories you’d never see on TV”. (Bourne et al, 2009:
17).
Video suits informative, interpretative, dialogic and argumentative genres on the web in
various ways, both reinforcing and enhancing their distinctive features and enabling
their evolution and growth in effectiveness and expressive wealth in a way that text and
still pictures could not provide by themselves.
Methods
This section discusses the aspects related to establishing a census, in what has to do
with the criteria which are used to design retrieval strategies, one of the methods of
choice for the research project along with in-depth descriptive analysis of specific and
defining aspects such as visual identity and branding (Negredo, 2009), and conducting
hypertextual and audiovisual analysis of videos selected for their relevance,
representativeness and production values.
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