Cover not available

In:Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
Edited by Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 256] 2015
► pp. 211–231

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

A participation perspective on television evening news in the age of immediacy

Published online: 12 February 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.256.09lom
In a context of intense media competition and a contemporary culture of talk, traditional TV news has devised ways to make news more interactive and closer to the TV audience. In British TV news programmes, the live exchange between news presenter and correspondent has been identified as a key site for discourse in a dialogic mode (Montgomery 2007; Tolson 2006). This study adopts a participation framework approach to analyse the live exchanges in a corpus of BBC evening news programmes over time. Findings indicate that while the frequency of live exchanges is sustained, they become shorter and less interactive, at the same time as other strategies are adopted to give the impression of extensive, immediate reporting. What emerges is an overriding concern with giving the appearance of “liveness”, sacrificing the interactive format of the traditional live exchange. The “token interactivity” which results may not encourage the kind of audience participation that facilitates understanding and retention.
References (28)
References
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finnegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Essex: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chovanec, Jan. 2009. “Simulation of Spoken Interaction in Written Online Media Texts.” Brno Studies in English 35 (2): 109–128. http://digilib.phil.muni.cz/handle/11222.digilib/105142.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. “Online Discussion and Interaction: The Case of Live Text Commentary.” In Cases on Online Discussion and Interaction: Experiences and Outcomes, ed. by Leonard Shedletsky and Joan E. Aitken, 234–251. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cushion, Stephen, and Justin Lewis (eds). 2010. The Rise of 24-Hour News Television Global Perspectives. New York and Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dynel, Marta. 2010. “Not Hearing Things – Hearer/Listener Categories in Polylogues.” mediAzioni 9. [URL].Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ekstrom, Mats. 2002. “Epistemologies of TV Journalism: A Theoretical Framework.” Journalism 3 (3): 259–282. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London and New York: Hodder Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1979. “Footing”. Semiotica 25: 1–29. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles. 2007. “Interactive Footing.” In Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction, ed. by Elizabeth Holt and Rebecca Clift, 16–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haarman, Louann. 2004. “‘John, What’s going on?’ Some Features of Live Exchanges on Television News.” In Corpora and Discourse, ed. by Alan Partington, John Morley, and Louann Haarman, 71–87. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haarman, Louann, and Linda Lombardo (eds). 2009. Evaluation and Stance in War News. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. 2011. “Mass Media.” In Pragmatics in Practice, Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights 9, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 248–263. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1993. “The Discourse Marker well. A Relevance-theoretical Account.” Journal of Pragmatics 19 (5): 435–453. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 1988. “Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations in Goffman’s Participation Framework.” In Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. by Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton, 161–227. Oxford: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lombardo, Linda. 2009. “Positioning and Stance in TV News Reporting of the 2003 Iraq War: The Anchor on CBS and the News Presenter on BBC.” In Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict, ed. by John Morley and Paul Bayley, 141–164. Abington, Oxon and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lorenzo-Dos, Nuria. 2009. Television Discourse: Analysing Language in the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montgomery, Martin. 2007. The Discourse of Broadcast News. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Keeffe, Anne. 2006. Investigating Media Discourse. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Owen, Marion. 1983. Apologies and Remedial Interchanges. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scannell, Paddy. 1996. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scott, Mike. 2012. Wordsmith Tools 6.0.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Sara, and Andreas H. Jucker. 2000. “ Actually and other Markers of an Apparent Discrepancy between Propositional Attitudes of Conversational Partners.” In Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude, ed. by Gisle Andersen and Fretheim Thorstein, 207–237. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Talbot, Mary. 2007. Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thompson, John. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thornborrow, Joanna, and Martin Montgomery. 2010. “Introduction.” Discourse & Communication 4: 99. , [URL].Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tolson, Andrew. 2006. Media Talk: Spoken Discourse in TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Bergillos, Ignacio
2019. Rethinking Vox-Pops in Television News Evolution of Person-on-the-Street Interviews in Spanish News Programs. Journalism Practice 13:9 ► pp. 1057 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue