It's Online, It's News: Appropriation Of Viral Narratives By The Digital Press

Abstract

At the crossway between information and entertainment, memes and newsgames are some of the news formats which, made viral in social networks, complement the informational experience and compete with the traditional news media in constructing alternative readings of the real. If in the light of Bakhtin (2002), journalism can be understood as a secondary discursive genre that feeds on primary genres (pp. 61-62), how is one to understand the circulation of these discourses produced from journalistic events in social networks? On the other hand, how are these narratives appropriated by the media? What functions do they play in media discourse? In this article we present some examples of products created from events of political impact. Thereafter, we discuss, by the analysis of a set of news stories, how the digital press, in the Iberian context, makes use of them. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the reflection on how the news media relate to these new narratives.