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Hyper-news: revolution or contradiction?

By Martin Engebretsen, Agder University College

ABSTRACT: Journalism as a form of text and communication is confronted with great challenges when going online and meeting the technology of hypertext. Old ideals concerning objectivity and authenticity may experience a renewal when journalists start replacing the traditional news narrative with the distribution of various source material in the form of separate nodes. A practice such as this will, however, have serious consequences for the inner coherence of the elements of news, and new principles for evaluating journalistic products will have to be developed.

KEYWORDS: Hypertext journalism, coherence, ethics

1. INTRODUCTION

Journalism is an area of writing which is heavily challenged by the new writing technology. Although the journalism of the old media in many ways represent a colourful and diverse body of text, it is a fairly stereotyped kind of discourse. After all, the journalistic media channels have in principle existed unchanged since the launching of television in the 1950s.

This stereotypy may be discerned in text patterns as well as in role patterns. Regarded as a text type the news prototype may be described as a variation of the narrative. The news story is held together by certain incidents, certain chronological and dramaturgical patterns and an inner logical cogency - just like the fairy tale, the piece of gossip and the short story. And the role of the journalist as a combination of dramatic adviser and narrator has become decisive for the understanding of the profession.

What happens then, when the computer, the Internet and hypertext enter the scene as news media? In my view, as a text linguist, it is in this field of textual structuring and coherence we have to seek the roots of both the possibilities and the limitations.

And yet, this field , where journalism, hypertext and text linguistics meet, is still almost untouched by research. The theories and models of textual coherence, as presented e.g. by de Beaugrande & Dressler in 1981 [1] is applied to news discourse e.g. by van Dijk in 1988 [2], and have found interesting applications in the field of software, as in the presentation interface of the SEPIA system, called SPI, thoroughly presented by Thüring, Hanneman & Haake in the electronic article “Hypermedia and Cognition: Designing for Comprehension” [3]. But the building of an integrated theoretical framework around these issues has yet to be started.

In this paper I shall point at certain issues that to my knowledge has scarcely been treated in the discussion of hyper-news.

2. NEWS AS NODES

Let us first point out what hyper-news really means. In its most radical - and most interesting - form it means presenting the raw material of a news incident in the form of independent nodes instead of writing it as a coherent narrative.

We may extract the use of quotations as an example of text elements which will have their status and function altered. Instead of extracting a quotation from a given discourse and putting it together with other selected bits of text elements, one may now give the source of the quotation a node of its own. Here the content of the quotation may be deepened and presented in a context more like the original one.

Similarly one may scan in documents or other kinds of primary sources.

3. COHERENCE: LOGIC AND ETHICS

Then there is the essential question of coherence: the mechanisms binding phrases, paragraphs and sections together in such a way that they create a text with an inner logic and consistency. Normally the loss of coherence is considered one of the greatest costs of hypertext. A news item will, however, always have a core or a centre, no matter whether it is presented as a narrative or by means of a collection of nodes. There will always be a reference to a kind of incident which may be formulated by means of one, two or three sentences. And if such a centre of discourse exists, the demand for global coherence has to continue, namely in the form of the individual relevance of each node in relation to this centre. The aspect of coherence which must be left behind, is the explicit coherence in between the nodes themselves, the one corresponding to the relation between neighbour sequences in a linear text.

As regards news, coherence is, however, a question not only of text linguistics but also of epistemology and ethics. Where was the coherence in the news before it was created by the journalist? The narrative demands an explicit coherence, but can the same be said to be true of the incidents of reality? It would perhaps be more ethical to leave it to the user to detect or create the relations which exist or may exist between the elements in the block of events presented as a piece of news. Such a line of thought leads to the assertion that the cost of the hyper-news’ logic is less than the gain of its ethics.

4. HESITATION IN THE NEWSROOMS

Some may claim that the vision of a more balanced, more objective and more authentic journalism is nearer to being realised in hypertext.

If that is so, why are there still so few among the hundreds of news producers today present on the Internet that experiment with hypertext? In a simple survey conducted in January I found that none of the ten largest Norwegian Internet newspapers presented their news by means of real hypertext structure, whereas three of them occasionally had links either over or under the news text proper.

I believe the explanation must be sought in cultural, practical as well as professional conditions, and the craftmanship of the old media still makes a strong impact on the new ones. We must, however, also take into account the down-to-earth costs that have to be considered in the newsrooms:

Firstly: How many of the users do actually want raw and unfiltered news? No matter how ethical they may be, the consumption of such news will demand more time and more attentive engagement on behalf of the user. It is worth remembering that news is also entertainment! Moreover it is claimed that a development in the direction of more “unfiltered news” will collide with the young Internet culture and its demand for a clear and subjective voice, a personal, committed and preferably provoking style, adapted to the dialogical, interactive manner of the net culture.

Secondly: It is most likely felt disturbing that the content of the term “effective communication” must be reevaluated. Even though the academic world long since has found the heirs of the mechanical communication model of Shannon & Weaver, it is still this very model that is at the root of the ideals in the production rooms. “How are we going to communicate this message effectively to our receptors?” is a central question. A transition to hyper-news implies that a new model of communication must be developed, introducing new principles of evaluation. This is going to take time, and there will surely be an abundance of frustrations along the way.

5. CONCLUSIONS

In the development of hyper-news, it is vital to take into account and maybe renew the textlinguistic notions of structuring and coherence, as they contribute tools for handling vital questions of both intelligibility, genre as well as communication mode. Although modest experimenting with hypertext has started in certain newsrooms, genuine hyper-news will probably not really take off until new notions of “effective communication” and new prototype-models of the news genres have been given a more firm foundation.

REFERENCES

1. de Beaugrande, Robert & Dressler, Wolfgang. Introduction to Text Linguistics. Longman, London & New York, 1981.

2. van Dijk, Teun A. News as Discourse. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1988.

3. Thüring, Mannfred; Hannemann, Jörg and Haake, Jörg M. Hypermedia and Cognition: Designing for Comprehension. http:irss.njit.edu:5080/papers/thuring/thuring.html #coherence