Characters in Portuguese digital journalism: a case study

Abstract

This article is the result of the case study carried out as part of the master thesis The Construction of the Character in Portuguese Digital Journalistic Narratives (Marques, 2016), whose main objective was to explore the mechanisms of figuration of literary characters in digital journalistic narratives, as well as to understand how journalistic narratives function in a digital environment and the impact of this environment on the characters’ figuration process. First, we present a brief theoretical framework about journalistic characters, before presenting the results of the empirical analysis applied to a series of reports from three Portuguese media outlets – Público, Expresso and Rádio Renascença. This analysis shows that, essentially, there are four types of journalistic characters, which perform different functions, i.e. humanization, authority, characterization of the journalistic characters and characterization of reality. Thus, the main objective of this study is to identify the characteristics of each character type.