The dynamic configuration of non-linear texts in live blogs: a discursive approach

Pablo Porto López

doi:10.1515/text-2020-0207

Article

The dynamic configuration of non-linear texts in live blogs: a discursive approach

Pablo Porto López is an Assistant Professor of Semiotics at the University of Buenos Aires. He holds a Master of Science degree in Discourse Analysis and is a PhD Student in Social Sciences at the same institution. He is a member of the Directive Committee of the Argentinian Association for Semiotic Studies. His research interests include news discourse, digital media, argumentation, and visual rhetoric.

Published/Copyright: January 28, 2022

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Submit Manuscript Author Information Explore this Subject

From the journal Text & Talk Volume 43 Issue 3

Abstract

News platforms increasingly cover ongoing events through live blogs. In these texts, individual updates with the latest developments are issued every few minutes and added into a reverse chronology list containing everything published up to that point. Even though the fragments work as a whole – as they make up a single account of a specific event – they must, at the same time, let online users opt in and out at different points of the coverage, while providing the necessary elements for a felicitous interpretation. This article examines the discursive mechanisms that allow live blogs to do this. The discursive analysis of six reports by The Guardian and BBC News shows that cohesive links that make interpretation dependent on items that have already been mentioned, such as pronouns and conjunctions, while common within single posts, rarely ever create ties across them. The study identifies the most frequent types of cohesive devices between posts and explains how they also interact with other elements that provide them with context. Finally, I conclude that the relative autonomy the posts enjoy enable users to navigate the text in non-sequential ways, which reduces the media’s control over the discursive interaction as the final product is assembled by the reader.

Keywords: cohesion; digital media; live blogs; non-linear texts; written journalism

Corresponding author: Pablo Porto López, Communication Sciences Department, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, Santiago del Estero 1029, C1075, Buenos Aires, Argentina, E-mail: pportolopez@sociales.uba.ar

Funding source: Secretary of Science and Technology of the University of Buenos Aires (UBACyT)

Award Identifier / Grant number: 20420180100024BA

About the author

Pablo Porto López

Pablo Porto López is an Assistant Professor of Semiotics at the University of Buenos Aires. He holds a Master of Science degree in Discourse Analysis and is a PhD Student in Social Sciences at the same institution. He is a member of the Directive Committee of the Argentinian Association for Semiotic Studies. His research interests include news discourse, digital media, argumentation, and visual rhetoric.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude to Fernando Mortoro for his contribution to this article and to the anonymous reviewers for their most valuable comments and suggestions.

Research funding: This work was supported by the Secretary of Science and Technology of the University of Buenos Aires (UBACyT) [grant number 20420180100024BA].

References

Adam, Jean-Michel. 1987. Textualité et séquentialité. L’exemple de la description. Langue Française 74. 51–72. https://doi.org/10.3406/lfr.1987.6435.Search in Google Scholar

Anscombre, Jean-Claude & Oswald Ducrot. 1994. La argumentación en la lengua. Madrid: Gredos.Search in Google Scholar

Benveniste, Émile. 2011 [1974]. Problemas de Lingüística General II, 18th edn. México: Siglo XXI Editores.Search in Google Scholar

Bower, Gordon H. & Randolph K. Cirilo. 1985. Cognitive psychology and text processing. In Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), Handbook of discourse analysis, 71–105. New York: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar

Charolles, Michel. 2011. Cohérence et cohésion du discours. In Klaus Hölker & Carla Marello (eds.), Dimensionen der Analyse von Texten und Diskursen. Dimensioni dell’analisi di testi e discorsi, 153–173. Berlin: LIT Verlag.Search in Google Scholar

Charolles, Michel, Anne Le Draoulec, Marie-Paule Pery-Woodley & Laure Sarda. 2005. Temporal and spatial dimensions of discourse organization. Journal of French Language Studies 15(2). 115–130. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959269505002036.Search in Google Scholar

Van Dijk, Teun A. 1981. Episodes as units of discourse analysis. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Analyzing discourse: Text and talk, 177–195. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Eco, Umberto. 2000 [1976]. Tratado de semiótica general, 5th edn. Barcelona: Lumen.Search in Google Scholar

Eco, Umberto. 2013 [1979]. Lector in fabula: la cooperación interpretativa en el texto narrativo, 1st edn. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.Search in Google Scholar

Eggins, Suzanne. 2004. An introduction to systemic functional linguistics. London: Continuum.Search in Google Scholar

Fernández, José L. 1994. Los lenguajes de la radio. Buenos Aires: Atuel.Search in Google Scholar

Fernández, José L. 2008. La construcción de lo radiofónico: modos de producción de la novedad discursiva. In José L. Fernández (ed.), La construcción de lo radiofónico, 9–73. Buenos Aires: La Crujía.Search in Google Scholar

García Negroni, María M. & Marta Tordesillas. 2001. La enunciación en la lengua: de la deixis a la polifonía. Madrid: Gredos.Search in Google Scholar

Halliday, Michael A. K. & Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar

Halliday, Michael A. K. & Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen. 2004 [1985]. An introduction to functional grammar, 3rd edn. London: Hodder Arnold.Search in Google Scholar

Haviland, Susan E. & Herbert H. Clark. 1974. What’s new? Acquiring new information as a process in comprehension. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13. 512–521. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-5371(74)80003-4.Search in Google Scholar

Hoey, Michael. 2001. Textual interaction: An introduction to written discourse analysis. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar

Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen. 2006 [1996]. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203619728Search in Google Scholar

Ledin, Per & David Machin. 2015. A discourse–design approach to multimodality: The visual communication of neoliberal management discourse. Social Semiotics 26(1). 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2015.1089652.Search in Google Scholar

Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. New forms of writing, new visual competencies. Visual Studies 23(2). 130–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725860802276263.Search in Google Scholar

Martin, James R. 2015. Cohesion and texture. In Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis, 2nd edn., vol. 1, 61–81. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.10.1002/9781118584194.ch3Search in Google Scholar

Marty, Emmanuel, Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel & Brigitte Sebbah. 2017. Internet users’ participation and news framing: The Strauss-Kahn case–related live blog at Le Monde.fr. New Media & Society 19(12). 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816650641.Search in Google Scholar

McLuhan, Marshall. 2005 [1964]. Understanding media. The extensions of man. New York: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar

Porto López, Pablo. 2010. La escritura del directo. Transformaciones y permanencias de lo radiofónico en las transmisiones deportivas de los diarios en Internet. Letra. Imagen. Sonido. Ciudad mediatizada 5. 107–125.Search in Google Scholar

Porto López, Pablo. 2014. Minuto a minuto: ¿El live blogging como nueva instancia de construcción del acontecimiento en directo? Letra. Imagen. Sonido. Ciudad mediatizada 11. 127–150.Search in Google Scholar

Porto López, Pablo. 2018. La crónica simultánea y la construcción del acontecimiento en desarrollo a través de lo escrito. Buenos Aires: University of Buenos Aires MA thesis.Search in Google Scholar

Porto López, Pablo. 2020. Los usos de Twitter en las crónicas simultáneas. Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico 26(1). 275–283. https://doi.org/10.5209/esmp.67306.Search in Google Scholar

Quirk, Randolph & Sidney Greenbaum. 1976 [1973]. A university grammar of English, 5th edn. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar

Sanders, Ted, Wilbert Spooren & Noormand Leo. 1992. Toward taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes 15(1). 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638539209544800.Search in Google Scholar

Sandvoss, Cornel. 2004. Technological evolution or revolution? Sport online live internet commentary as postmodern cultural form. Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 10(3). 39–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/135485650401000304.Search in Google Scholar

Tereszkiewicz, Anna. 2014. “I’m not sure what that means yet, but we’ll soon find out” – the discourse of newspaper live blogs. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 131. 299–319. https://doi.org/10.4467/20834624SL.14.018.2326.Search in Google Scholar

Thurman, Neil & Anna Walters. 2013. Live blogging – digital journalism’s pivotal platform? A case study of the production, consumption, and form of live blogs at Guardian.co.uk. Digital Journalism 1(1). 82–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2012.714935.Search in Google Scholar

Verón, Eliseo. 2001. El living y sus dobles. Arquitecturas de la pantalla chica. In El cuerpo de las imágenes, 13–40. Buenos Aires: Norma.Search in Google Scholar

White, Peter R. R. 1998. Telling media tales: The news story as rhetoric. Sydney: University of Sydney Dissertation.Search in Google Scholar

Simultaneous reports cited

BBC News. 2019. Notre-Dame cathedral engulfed by fire. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-47942176 (accessed 19 July 2021).Search in Google Scholar

Burnton, Simon, Tom Davies & Daniel Harris. 2020. Transfer news: Fernandes and Willian latest, Podence joins Wolves – live! The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2020/jan/30/transfer-news-bruno-fernandes-olivier-giroud-and-danny-rose-live (accessed 19 July 2021).Search in Google Scholar

Cheung, Helier, Amber Dawson & Lucy Fleming. 2014. As it happened: Oscar Pistorius verdict. BBC News. https://web.archive.org/web/20140912203302/http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29163688 (accessed 19 July 2021).Search in Google Scholar

Ellis-Petersen, Hannah & Kate Lyons. 2019. Trump says Kim wanted all sanctions lifted at Vietnam summit – live. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2019/feb/28/trump-kim-summit-leaders-to-meet-for-day-two-of-talks-in-vietnam-live (accessed 19 July 2021).Search in Google Scholar

Gayle, Damien, Aamna Mohdin, Ben Quinn, Ben Doherty & Naaman Zhou. 2020. Coronavirus: Returning Britons to be ‘safely isolated’ for 14 days, says Hancock – latest news. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/jan/29/coronavirus-live-updates-china-wuhan-death-toll-cases-symptoms-treatment-evacuation-us-japanese-citizens-latest-news (accessed 19 July 2021).Search in Google Scholar

Murray, Scott. 2016. Manchester City 1–3 Leicester City: Premier League – as it happened. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2016/feb/06/manchester-city-leicester-city-premier-league-live (accessed 19 July 2021).Search in Google Scholar

Received: 2020-12-03

Accepted: 2022-01-13

Published Online: 2022-01-28

Published in Print: 2023-05-25

You are currently not able to access this content.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0207

Keywords for this article

cohesion; digital media; live blogs; non-linear texts; written journalism