Representing time in live blogs: From liveness to non-liveness
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | One of the most interesting recent developments in journalism is the appearance of a new genre of reporting in online newspapers, generally known as either ‘live text commentaries’ or ‘live blogs’. The defining characteristic of such texts is that they supply their readers with news coverage in real time, contemporaneous with the unfolding news event. Although ‘live blogging’ has been extensively covered both in media studies (Thurman and Walters 2014; Matheson and Wahl-Jorgensen 2020) and in linguistically-oriented media discourse analysis (Chovanec, 2018; Werner 2021), there are still many pragma-linguistic phenomena that are not sufficiently described, particularly as regards the discursive management of time, i.e. liveness vs. non-liveness. Against the background of the conventional means of expressing liveness in traditional broadcast media, the presentation seeks to identify the strategies for negotiating the temporal dimension in the written textual mode in digital live news blogs. Based on a dataset of recent political live blogs from the Guardian, the paper documents how the blogging journalists actively alternate between tenses and enhance the continuity of the coverage. The analysis has also indicated a host of structural and linguistic devices which are found in journalistic blogs that are no longer ‘live’ and remain archived on the news websites. The presentation identifies such ‘contextualization cues’ of non-liveness, whose presence appears to be crucial for triggering the recipients’ interpretative processes, helping them to arrive at a correct understanding of the text, namely, placing the (no longer live) journalistic blog with respect to two crucial temporal moments: (a) the (past) news event and (b) the non-overlapping moment of the text’s reception and processing. |
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