ANALYSING NEW MEDIA: THE LAYOUT STRATEGIES OF GREEK ONLINE PRESS AND THE AUDIENCE’S READING PRACTICES

Abstract

This paper examines the layout and infographics of a digital article and the possible reading practices of the audience of online press. Our data consist of 114 texts from Greek online newspapers, magazines and pure players from three journalistic genres: news articles, opinion articles and interviews, and five semantic fields: art/fashion, environment/ecology, health/sports, science/technology and politics/finance. Our purpose is to examine the structure of these texts and discuss the strategies of reading online articles often containing hyperlinks that reflect other texts in an explicit or tacit way (Fairclough, 2006). Our method requires a double analysis at the microstructure level with a combination of the frameworks of the “communication on the media” of Charaudeau (2011) and the “media discourse analysis” of Fairclough (1992), and at the macrostructure level with the model of the reading strategies of online press (pro-intensive, pro-inventive and pro-extensive models) of Saemmer (2015). According to our results the format of a digital article is fluid varying from long texts to short texts that hold the reader's attention, yet all our data include audiovisual support. As for the reading practices, news articles follow the pro-extensive model, opinion articles the pro-inventive model with readers eager to participate, and the interviews the pro-extensive model but still using the format of their printed parent-genre as a base. Finally, only 22 hyperlinks were found, something that shows that inserting hyperlinks is a strategy slightly explored in the Greek online press.