Telling stories from the newsroom: a linguistic ethnographic account of dramatization in broadcast news

Abstract

Drawing on Linguistic Ethnography and Narrative Studies, the paper hones in on the on-going production of a news item about an airplane crash in Indonesia broadcasted by the Swiss French-speaking public TV in 2007. It shows how telling a story in the news is a team performance: from the structuring of the narrative to the dramatization of the reported events. The analysis focuses on a preliminary narrative sequence occurring at the beginning of the news item. It details step by step how and on the basis of what criteria media practitioners negotiate their narrative choices and what leads them to adopt a particular narrative configuration over another.