Toward the Conversationalization of Media Discourse : Showbiz Vlog News
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | When thinking of news presenting, we usually tend to associate it with traditional TV news, broadcast at the same time each day. Recently, however, the use of the Internet has increased significantly and it did not take long until videoblogging intervened in the world of news presenting. In the early beginnings of videoblogging, some Internet users started to comment on daily/weekly news in their personal vlogs and after some time, these vlogs started to resemble each other in terms of form, style and content. In my research, I focus on those vlogs that are devoted to the presentation of show business news and regard them as a specific subgenre of news presenting called ‘showbiz vlog news.’ The aim of my research is to identify distinctive characteristics of showbiz vlog news and to determine to what extent these programs resemble broadcast news. The analysis itself is twofold. Firstly, the discursive structure of showbiz vlog news is described and compared to the structure of TV news bulletin. Secondly, interactional phenomena (turn-taking, fragmentations and repairs, lexical choice) have been explored. The analysis shows that (1) even though showbiz vlog news developed a number of structural elements specific to vlogging, the discursive structure of TV news bulletin has been adopted to a large extent; and (2) showbiz vlog news has adopted a number of features typical of ordinary conversation, e.g. evaluations, newsmarks, fragmentations, slang, quotative be like. These features are understood as consequences of the referee design. Moreover, it is shown that current trends of news presenting (the use of two presenters, the emphasis on dynamism and entertainment), which are generally associated with the process known as the conversationalization of public discourse, affect the genre of showbiz vlog news. Therefore, it is argued that the conversation-like character of showbiz vlog news might have partly been occasioned by the ongoing conversationalization. |
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