News Discourse and Digital Currents

In recent years, journalistic practices have undergone a radical change due to the increasing pressure of new digital media on the professional practice. The ever-growing development of new technologies and the ceaseless fluctuation of social practices have challenged some of the traditional genres found in these professional contexts.

On the basis of these premises, this book investigates a particular genre found in the context of TV newscasts. The genre under investigation is that of news tickers (or crawlers), that is, the graphic elements that scroll at the bottom of the screen during newscasts. The book introduces readers to this under-researched genre through a year-long collection of the news tickers displayed on BBC World News. Thanks to a corpus-based genre analysis, the generic status of news tickers is better defined by highlighting the presence of given strategies of marketization. Additionally, this volume investigates if news tickers can be seen as a mixed (sub-)genre that interdiscursively combines traditional linguistic elements of headlines and lead paragraphs to achieve, from a (Critical) Genre Analysis point of view, a specific private intention in the context of the BBC.