From Printed newspaper to digital newspaper: What has changed?

Abstract

Cyberjournalism as a social and dialogical practice has been characterized by four textual/discursive qualities that are involved in the transition from printed newspaper to digital newspaper: interactivity with the reader, linearity, multimodality, and information velocity. The author examines how these four qualities are exhibited in newspapers published in Brazil. The corpus is composed of 540 texts distributed in nine genres of printed and electronic versions of two Brazilian newspapers: Folha de São Paulo and O Globo. This investigation shows an increase in three of these characteristics in digital newspapers: interactivity with the reader, multimodality, and information velocity. In addition, the analysis of hypertext in these newspapers emphasizes nonlinear reading as an indispensable part in the process of meaning construction.