Media Communication: Types, Characteristics, and Journalistic Genres
Media Communications: An Overview
Media communications press: Information transmitted to a large group of people. Types include cinema, press, radio, TV, and the internet. Characteristics: collective audience (concrete or abstract), dependent on technology, information reaches distant sites, unidirectionality, and combination of codes.
The Media: Publications on Paper
The media: All publications on paper. Classification by support: generic press (covering any topic), specialized press (focused on specific topics). Disposition by topic: local, national, regional, international. Periodicity: daily, weekly, bi-weekly. Seriousness: serious press (objective data), tabloids (designed to attract readers).
Types of Paper Publications
The paper: The oldest form of press, financed by sales and advertising. Characteristics: Objective (providing information with objectivity and timeliness), shaping readers’ opinions on current events. Organized into sections based on importance, with the most important news on the first page, odd-numbered pages, and the upper part of the page being more important than the lower part. Combination of codes: written language and paralinguistic features.
Journalistic Genres
Journalistic genres: Information (news, reportage, interview), opinion (opinion article, editorial, letters to the editor), and mixed genres (the chronicle).
The News
The news: An event of interest, current, unsigned, and objective. Structure: Headlines: Phatic, designed to attract attention. Includes an anti-title, main title, and subtitle. Introduction: The first paragraph of the news, often in bold, must contain the fundamental news. Body: Expands on the introduction, developing the information with increasingly important data until the end.
The Story: Insight
The story: Insight into a story, a lengthy news article with a more personal style, where the reporter shares their observations and thoughts, blending information and opinion (information > opinion).
The Interview
Interview: Two types: Current affairs: the interviewee gives their opinion on a current topic. Psychological: focuses on the interviewee’s private life. Structure: presentation, interview follows a question-answer format.
Opinion Genres
Opinion genres: The article: A topical piece signed by an author outside the newspaper; the newspaper is not responsible for the opinions expressed. The editorial: An unsigned article that represents the newspaper’s stance on a specific topic. It is a mix of exposition and argumentation. Mixed genre: Chronicle: A signed article with a personal style, fixed timing, and a blend of information and opinion.
Language in Journalistic Texts
The language in journalistic texts: Characterized by variety and heterogeneity due to the different genres. Informative texts, especially news, are the most common. Linguistic ranges in the news: Purpose: to transmit objective information easily to a heterogeneous audience. Objectivity: Use of the third person, except in quotations, impersonal passive constructions, denotative lexicon, and descriptive adjectives. Abundance of direct style, easily assimilated text with a logical structure, use of specialized lexicon without excessive technical terms. Accumulation of information, trying to transmit as much data as possible in the smallest space, permeability, and neglect of stylistic elements.
Proprietors
Proprietors: Tendency towards brevity, highlighting the most important aspects. Nominalization, attributive non-verbal phrases, and use of the present tense.