A participation perspective on television evening news in the age of immediacy

In a context of intense media competition and a contemporary culture of talk, traditional TV news has devised ways to make news more interactive and closer to the TV audience. In British TV news programmes the live exchange between news presenter and correspondent has been identified as a key site for discourse in a dialogic mode (Montgomery 2007; Tolson 2006). This study adopts a participation framework approach to analyse the live exchanges in a corpus of BBC evening news programmes over time. Findings indicate that while the frequency of live exchanges is sustained, they become shorter and less interactive, at the same time as other strategies are adopted to give the impression of extensive, immediate reporting. What emerges is an overriding concern with giving the appearance of 'liveness', sacrificing the interactive format of the traditional live exchange. The 'token interactivity' which results may not encourage the kind of audience participation that facilitates understanding and retention.