Evolution of the Feature Article Genre in Online Media in the Context of Multi-Media

<p>This paper is concerned with Evolution of the Feature Article Genre in Online Media in the Context of Multi-Media. Despite the rapid development of network journalism and online media , the evolution of journalistic genres in online media is still poorly understood.</p><p>To define the methodological base of the research, we have reinterpreted key concepts and ideas about the genre structure of journalistic texts &nbsp;in line with methods of theoretical poetics. We took advantage of methods of the russian &laquo;formalist literary criticism&raquo; (Shklovsky, eykhenbaum, Tynyanov and others), M.M. Bakhtin and the functionalists.&nbsp; In the framework of the declared method, the genre is defined by a set of features that form a stable combination .&nbsp;</p><p>We undertook a functional analysis of the feature articles genre, and presenting the list of typical functional units of it. Then we introduced the concept of &quot;multimedia story&quot; and its structure. It should be stressed &nbsp;that if in a print media, any functional units &nbsp;of the narrative can be implemented only by the text, in multimedia story it can be implemented by any of&nbsp; the info-atoms&nbsp; (sound, video, graphics, text). To analyze how usual texts as a part of a multimedia-story can be transformed, we examined &nbsp;how functional units of print genres &nbsp;interact with multimedia story units implement the same functions in the multimedia narrative.&nbsp;</p><p>Our research has enabled us make the following conclusions: &nbsp;In a multi-media story the role of paratextual elements is significantly changing (they can only denote topic, although function of navigation is tend to be implemented by graphic), background information and additional information tends to be realized not by&nbsp; the text, it tends &nbsp;to take on visual forms rather than text forms, and usualy become part of&nbsp; the epytext. Dialogues and monologues, are also &nbsp;tends to be &nbsp;implemented by videos, but remain as a part of &nbsp;the linear story narrative, without duplication of content in text forms.&nbsp;</p>