Drawing on video recordings of editorial conferences of a German TV news magazine, we show how television producers orient to genre claims that are central to their professional self-definition. Although genre isn’t explicitly negotiated, participants orient to genre both in the overall structure of the conferences and in specific practices.
Studies of mass media communication have mainly been concerned with the interaction for an overhearing audience, primarily focusing on the media product und typical features of media talk. However, media products are the result of collaborative work, which in large parts remains invisible to recipients. In order to understand how media products are produced we thus are interested in how interaction within the production process leads to the broadcasted product. Given that genre is not only a central notion of media and communication studies, but a concept that media producers themselves take into account (as our interview with the broadcast's editors showed), we are interested in whether and how news magazine editors orient to genre claims within editorial conferences. Previous research with a focus on the interactive construction of media products and editorial conferences mainly focused on gatekeeping, argumentation or the fabrication of news stories in press agencies. How news editors orient to genre, however, was neglected. Drawing on video recordings of editorial conferences of a German TV news magazine and interviews with its producers, we will focus on how participants orient to genre that are central to their professional self-definition in their interaction in two respects:
- Genre-conforming media products are accomplished by organizational procedures and specific types of speech exchange systems on the production level: Genre is rarely negotiated explicitly by the editorial staff. Starting from the observations that editorial conferences are (a) embedded within patterns of wider organizational procedures and (b) highly restricted types of interaction, we show how participants in this institutional context orient to genre claims.
- Genre is accomplished by the way participants deal with potential news topics: We will show how news editors orient to genre claims interactionally by e.g. implicit evaluations, forms of responsiveness and the sequential structure of the decision-making processes.
