Saying “story” in the newsroom. Towards a linguistic ethnography of narrative lexicon in broadcast news
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24434/j.scoms.2018.01.010Keywords:
News, narrative, story, histoire, metalanguage, formulations, newsroom, small story research, linguistic ethnographyAbstract
Despite a general agreement on the narrative nature of news, the question of what it means for the journalists to tell a story is usually taken for granted, while the analysis of the actual narrative practices in the newsrooms often remains shallow. A way of overcoming this state of affairs is to have a look at the narrative practices and norms in the newsroom. On the one hand, one can track the sites of narrative engagement in the newsroom, where journalists are telling or handling stories in order to achieve their work of making news. On the other hand, one can track the metacommentaries that foreground a narrative orientation to news, when journalists evaluate storying choices or when they use a narrative-related lexicon. This paper explores the latter aspect by tracking the uses of the word « histoire » (story) in the newsroom of a Swiss Public Broadcasting Corporation. The paper identifies and analyses three different meanings of « histoire »: « histoire » as a genre, « histoire » as a set of information and « histoire » as a semiotic product. As a reflexive means, « histoire » enables the media practitioners to navigate the very practical tasks entailed by the production of the multimodal artefact that a television news item is
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2018 Gilles Merminod
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The electronic contributions in the Internet are distributed under the "Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivatives 4.0 International" - License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows others to share the work in any medium or format with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in Studies in Communication Sciences SComS. However, the work may not be altered or transformed and it may not be used for commercial purposes. These conditions are irrevocable. The full text of the license may be read under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en