News as a genre of discourse: A non-missing structure

The article refers to the news text type, the genre status of which, if not contradictory, is quite difficult to determine, which explains certain differences in approaches to its study. News does not constitute a single genre from the point of view of journalism due to a whole complex of factors, including the ambiguity of the nature of news as a media text in addition to differences in the research methods. Nevertheless, a layperson identifies the distinctive features of this media product, which raises the question of the status of news as a single text type. The purpose of this article is to substantiate the status of the media product “news” as a genre of discourse. The hypothesis of the research is the understanding of the expediency of using the combination of genre and discursive approaches. Considering news as a genre of discourse, i.e., a genre (the content of a media product) that forms a discourse (the unity of the linguistic form, events and actions) and exists in various discursive formats (the structure of a media product), seems productive for the analysis of media texts under study. The heuristic potential of the term “genre of discourse” makes it possible to describe the specificity of this media product. Thus, the features of the content side of the text are taken into account, expressed at the level of rendering factual (what, when, where and to who something happened) and conceptual (what is the social message of this event) information, and its structural characteristics, expressed in various formats of information transfer. The research is based on a discourse analysis approach that prioritizes participants’ social cognition in news communication and the discursive practices involved in it, the theory of genres in the Bakhtin understanding, the types of information of the text according to I.R. Galperin. The material of the study was the author’s selection of news texts from the mass media in the UK and the USA in the period from 2019 to 2022 in both “paper” and electronic forms. The study involved methods of observation, interpretive analysis of texts, the method of keywords in the analysis of types of information according to I.R. Galperin.