Climate-induced Migration and Infotainment

The Ultimate Edge of News Construction?

Abstract

Climate-induced migration is not an extensively studied issue, nevertheless it is one of the most interesting and socially widely-impacting types of migration. In this paper, climate-induced migration is discussed in relation to the rise of a number of news writing strategies. As Brands (1998) suggested, entertainment formats are increasingly acquiring importance as first-hand sources of information, and this may trigger a process of reduction in the quantity and quality of news the media offer, provided that the rules of entertainment do not necessarily comply with the rules of news construction. Besides other news writing strategies, the inverted pyramid paradigm seems to decline in favour of a more narrative style or of more technologically-rooted forms of texts such as hypertexts. From a description of infotainment and of other journalism styles, the paper moves on to present a contrastive analysis and the results of in-field research carried out to investigate what kind of narratives are at play and how news is constructed. For the contrastive analysis, a corpus of pictures (taken from .it and .uk web domains) and Italian and British newspaper articles were collected. Images were collected together with articles, given the importance that the visual level and imagery have gained in news construction.