Understanding Journalistic Texts: Features and Genres

Posted on Jan 22, 2025 in Primary Education

Journalistic Texts: An Overview

Journalistic texts serve a dual purpose: to inform and to comment, while also aiming to entertain the reader, particularly in sections like hobbies and supplements.

Basic Features of Journalistic Texts

  1. Plural Reception: They are aimed at large groups, assuming prior knowledge and references.
  2. Unidirectional Communication: Immediate feedback is difficult, limiting the receiver’s influence on the information.
  3. Diverse Codes: They use linguistic codes, iconography (photos, drawings), typography (font, character size), color, and spatial arrangement.
  4. Variety of Items: A broad vocabulary is needed due to the diverse information, grouped into sections like international, national, culture, sports, and economy.
  5. Classification:
    • Informational Texts: Focus on novelty, diversity, interest, and atypical events, disseminating objective data.
    • Evaluative/Opinion Texts: Involve judgments and evaluations, prioritizing commentary depth over novelty.

Newspaper Genres

Informational Genres

These genres prioritize objective information and use a referential function.

A) News

News presents objective facts of general interest. Its structure includes:

  1. Headlines (main title, subtitle): Provide a brief overview, emphasizing brevity and conciseness.
  2. Lead Paragraph: The first paragraph contains the most relevant information, answering the six Ws: What, Who, How, When, Where, and Why.
  3. Body: Expands on the details and provides additional data.
  4. Structure: Often arranged in an inverted pyramid, starting with the most relevant facts and progressing to less important details.
B) Report

A report is an in-depth journalistic work requiring extensive research and documentation, offering a detailed perspective on a specific event.

C) Chronicle

A chronicle combines objective facts with the journalist’s assessment, often considered a form of opinion.

Linguistic Features of Informational Genres

Informational genres use clear, concise, and correct language, accessible to a general audience, with descriptive adjectives and a glossary tailored to the subject matter (politics, economy, culture, society, sports).