Changing News Genres as a Result of Global Technological Developments

Abstract

Based on research carried out over two years amongst groups of students from the United Kingdom, France, United States and Russia, this article explores how churnalism is not only having an impact on what people read but also on how they read it, with far-reaching consequences for what has traditionally been perceived as the news genre. Drawing on genre as a social action, we explore the ways in which churnalism is changing news consumption. New news genres are appearing in response to new social interactions that users repeatedly act out predominantly online. As users, we produce and consume texts which we refer to as “news” in multiple situations which can be sorted into patterns. Our comparative analysis offers surprising insights into how these patterns form new news genres, characteristic of social media (many-to-many) instead of mass media (one-to-many). Genres should be studied not only through textual analysis but also through the prism of social reality and recurrent social actions, particularly now that users, rather than journalists, are taking a dominant role in identifying what constitutes news genres. Our perception of what defines news is determined by the changing ways in which we consume news.