Formatting liveness in live journalistic blogs
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In the past couple of decades, live journalism has expanded from its traditional formats of radio and television broadcasting to the online space. Digital journalism has transformed the older forms of news presentation, resulting in the rise of new genres of delivering news content in real time (Ekström and Westlund, 2019). The talk contributes to this emerging subfield of research by adopting a pragmalinguistic perspective on the currently dominant form of digital liveness, i.e. news presentation in the written mode as live ‘text-in-process’. The presentation concentrates on the genre of written live news described as ‘live blogging’ in media studies (Thurman and Walters 2014; Matheson and Wahl-Jorgensen 2020) and as ‘live text’ (Chovanec, 2018; Werner 2021) in linguistically-oriented media discourse analysis. Based on a dataset of recent political live blogs from the Guardian, it identifies some of the key pragmatic characteristics of such online texts-in-process against the background of traditional live broadcasting, particularly as regards the formatting of liveness. This approach is inspired by Scannell’s (2014: 154) suggestion that live talk requires careful formatting or ‘management’ so that the ‘empty time’ is filled because, in the management of liveness, it is the achievement and maintenance of continuity that is crucial (156). The findings identify the central role of temporal deixis in the process of formatting liveness in live blogs, and document the discursive management of deictic centres and deictic shifts within and across the individual time-stamped posts, particularly as far as the processing of various ‘journalistic raw data’ (quotes, social media statements) is concerned. The paper argues for the conceptual shift from ‘liveness as nowness’ (Marriott 2007), i.e., a continual live production of talk, to ‘suspended liveness’ in digital journalism, where the actual textual production is put on hold – so to speak – in expectation of possible later updates. |
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