One of the ways of researching online journalism is the analysis of the message. This is one of the first trends, especially when hypertext and journalism was studied. We will talk about the methods and the theoretical approaches used in the last decade and how to adapt some methodological tools to the study of online journalism, for example content analysis, discourse analysis (and its different schools) and narratology.
The main goal of this paper is to draw some trends and methods to analyse to which extent the message is significantly changing due to the effects of the convergence process, as defined in an ongoing project funded by the Ministry of Educations and Science of Spain (SEJ2006-14828-C06-02), and try to explain how the journalistic discourse is built in these times of convergence.
For the immediate future, we propose to carry on a content analysis and a discourse analysis of both textual and paratextual elements, and of hypertext, interactivity, multimediality, memory as characteristics of the digital discourse, from the point of view of disciplines like linguistics, documentation or semiotics. Our proposal is to apply some methodologies related to our aim to describe precisely which are the characteristics that define the (cyber)journalistic products on the Internet, trying so to propose typologies or even an attempt of criteria to define journalistic genres on the Net.
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Reference
Javier Díaz-Noci, Lluís Codina, Lia da Fonseca Seixas, Guillermo López García, Dolors Palau Sampio, Bella Palomo, Anna Tous Rovirosa. «Content and message analysis of online journalism: some methodological proposals» Trípodos [EXTRA 2009], v. 1, May 2009. Access: Download | Research Gate