Online edition “The Independent”: structural and compositional characteristics and the specificity of its content

Abstract

The development of information technologies has affected the emergence of convergent journalism. Despite the active development of this topic by Russian and Belarusian researchers, its type as convergent media discourse has not yet been sufficiently studied in terms of syncretism of its intra - and extralinguistic characteristics in a comparative aspect in different journalistic cultures. In this regard, the authors set a goal to identify and describe the structural, compositional and content features of the British convergent mass communication media "The Independent" using the author's integrative method of discourse analysis, which includes formal criteria that reflect the organizational structure and design of the publication, its quantitative indicators; criteria of multimedia technologies that allow to identify the degree of presence and severity of the phenomenon of convergence in it. The specificity of content is revealed through the representation of extralinguistic criteria using the following discourse categories: audience, communicative attitude, self-identification, space, time, intertextuality, intersubjectivity, intersubjectivity. The "stylistic range" category reflects the textual organization of the British online publication under study. The analysis noted the widespread use of creolized media texts and a large number of hyperlinks in their content. A continuous sampling method was used to analyze the genre diversity in certain categories of the online publication. the results are accompanied by statistical indicators. The results of the research will be used to build a British model of convergent mass media discourse, which will later allow us to compare it with models existing in other journalistic traditions, in particular, the Belarusian and American ones. This approach will provide an opportunity to reconstruct the organization models of modern media content, as well as to identify how they perceive and reflect the picture of the world: what are the similarities or differences, and what causes it.