Eija Ventola

University of Salzburg

Multimodality, Multimediality and Multiliteracies – A New Era for the Press

Transmission of news has faced radical changes in the past decades. The change can be considered as significant as that from moving from the oral medium transmitted ‘news’ to the written medium where news are published in newspapers. We may consider newspapers as a kind of a ‘text colony’, since they contain various kinds of text types in them – news, letters to the editors, advertisements, financial reports, weather forecasts, cartoons, etc. Linguists have typically been interested in the texts appearing in newspapers, studying first their grammatical and lexical features and later their discourse features as text types as well as the various social and ideological issues in the texts of newspapers (e.g. tabloid papers vs. quality papers).

Today, however, the newspaper as a written, paper form medium has its rival, the electronic newspaper. This paper focuses on the challenges that multimodal and multimedial news and other text types associated with the ‘news colony texts’ bring to us as readers and researchers in terms of developing multiliteracies in the new technological era.