Informative Genre in Journalism: Structure, Characteristics, and Examples
Informative Genre in Journalism
A) Functional Aspects
The primary functions of informative articles are to provide information and express opinions. While secondary, they also aim to entertain the reader (e.g., hobbies, specific supplements).
The information function is fulfilled through the dissemination of objective information about events of interest. The opinion role involves issuing evaluative judgments on the facts. It’s common to find newspaper articles that both report and assess information (e.g., news analysis, commentary).
B) General Characteristics
- They target large groups.
- They are unidirectional messages.
- Besides language codes, they use iconic codes (typography, spacing, cones, photos).
- Generally, they presuppose prior knowledge from the reader.
- They refer to different topics and require extensive lexical knowledge.
Informative Genres
1. Breaking News
This is the quintessential informative genre. Its objective is to spread various current events that are of general interest, geographically relevant, atypical, and have personal relevance. The level of interest in a story is strongly related to the target audience.
When writing a news story, journalists often follow the rule of the six Ws: who, what, where, when, how, and why.
News Structure
- Headline: Captures the essence of the story and aims to attract attention.
- Subheadline: Qualifies or completes the information in the headline. Its function is similar to a subheader.
Headline Characteristics:
- Brief but informative.
- Verbs are not abundant and, if present, usually in the present tense.
- Verbs like “be” are often omitted.
- Sometimes the reporting verb is deleted to introduce direct quotes.
- Declarative sentences are common.
- Circumstantial complements of place often precede other elements.
- Predominance of nominal complements.
- Punctuation is usually limited to commas and colons.
- Lead or Intro: This paragraph expands on the headline and answers the main Ws of the news. It may appear in bold or a different font than the body text. Sometimes the lead is the first paragraph of the body. In short news, the entire piece might be the lead.
- Body: Provides the complete development of the information, expanding on details and adding additional information. The body structure follows the inverted pyramid model, starting with the most relevant information and progressively introducing less crucial elements.
2. Feature
A feature can be considered an extension of the news, delving deeper into the basic facts, circumstances, environment, history, and consequences. It is not as objective as straight news and is usually signed by the author. It combines narrative and descriptive styles, emphasizing one or the other depending on whether it reports on direct action or a recreational event.
To attract attention, feature headlines often use phrases connected to movie titles, songs, or word games. In essence, a feature provides in-depth information on an incident, situation, or person of interest.
3. Interview
An interview reproduces a dialogue between a journalist and a prominent figure. Its purpose is to provide information from a specific source: the interviewee.
There are two main types of interviews: biographical-psychological, where the interviewee talks about themselves, and general or informational, where they discuss various issues.
This genre is closely related to opinion pieces, as the interviewee often expresses subjective viewpoints.
Recurring Characteristics of Informative Texts
A) Lexicosemantic
- The lexicon should be clear, concise, and correct.
- It uses standard language.
- Adjectives should be descriptive, not evaluative.
- The lexicon should be objective, with denotation prevailing over connotation.
- Journalists may use specialized vocabulary depending on the subject matter.
- Barbarisms (e.g., “positioning”), initialisms, acronyms, and commonly used expressions (e.g., “in order to”, “based on”) may appear.
- Synonyms (simple or complex) are used to avoid repetition.
- Euphemisms are employed.
- Foreign words may be present.
B) Morphosyntactic
- Abundance of adjectives, both attributive and predicative, with a clarifying function.
- Among determiners, articles and demonstratives are predominant.
- Verbs are mainly in the indicative mood and often compound tenses.
- Frequent use of the simple past or transitive verbs with numerous expansions: complements of place, time, manner, and cause.
- Due to the need for clarity, adjective clauses are common.
- Many subordinate noun clauses function as direct objects, either direct or indirect.
- Adverbial phrases of place, time, and manner are common.
- Due to the speed of news writing and translation from foreign agencies, grammatical errors and unusual structures (e.g., analytic passive) may occur.
- The situational complement of place is usually placed at the beginning of the sentence.
- Tendency to use prepositional phrases instead of single prepositions and paraphrases of simple words.
- Use of the third person to maintain objectivity.
- Combination of long and short verb phrases to achieve a balance between detail and readability.
- Use of the conditional mood to report unconfirmed information.