Language of Social Media: Multimodal Linguistic Idioms in Modern Journalism

The rapid development of the Internet has already influenced all the spheres of human life. Mass media, the realm that always responds to the newest trends, has also undergone changes brought by the Internet. The previous studies took into consideration this shift towards digitalization, though, the authors gave more attention to the describing the main features of digital journalism. Moreover, the Western mass media served as the main field of research. This paper aims at eliminating this gap by analyzing the changes in Russian and English news journalistic discourse and the increased role of multimodality in it. A contrastive analysis, discourse analysis, media and content analysis are chosen as the basic methods of the research. The researcher has analyzed a wide spectrum of works dedicated to the topic and has implied it into the research. The anticipated results of this paper are the creation of deep comparative analysis of Russian and British mass media relocated to the Internet, the revealing of main paradigms of the news making from the multimodal perspective and making some theoretical predictions. The results of this paper may be useful for journalists who develop their Internet profiles and to the linguists studying the key features of new journalistic discourse.