A Genre-based Approach To News Interviews

As an increasingly important type of journalistic and political discourse, news interviews gain relatively less attention by linguists. A news interview is a readily recognizable discourse in the way that it is structured. It takes a very old form of communication-conversation, and takes news as its content and television as a medium to present itself. It begins to occupy a prominence in the domain of broadcast journalism and political communication. It also serves as an influential alternative to the traditional narrative or story form of news presentation. Thus as a special type of genre, the news interview is worthy of scientific attention. In recent years, due to its status in the domain of journalism and political communication, news interviews have begun to draw the attentions of a few researchers in the linguistic circle. After many efforts were made, news interviews are starting to take a position in the linguistic circle. With their efforts and my own understanding, news interview is put under scrutiny in the present study with genre orientation. By examining the news interview with genre orientation, we can understand better how the involved participants select strategies to achieve their communicative purpose within the constraints by the genre it belongs to and why they make such choices. In addition, it draws a better picture of the macrostructure and microstructure of news interview so as to help people concerned to understand better how to perform appropriately in such institutional settings.