Towards a new audiovisual narrative: an analysis of videos published by five online Spanish newspapers

Abstract

The objective of the research reported in this article was to analyse and quantify the narrative techniques employed in videos embedded in the home pages of five Spanish online newspapers. For the purpose of tracing the evolution of the approaches taken by these digital dailies away from the traditional narrative models used in television production, two separate study samples representing video reporting published online in 2011 and 2014 were examined. Findings show that material outsourced from agencies largely comprised short videos with voiceovers that conformed to the narrative structures of traditional journalism whereas those produced in-house by the five online dailies studied offered an innovative model that borrowed freely from other genres, involved longer stories supported by sound bites rather than voiceovers and were structured along lines other than those of the classic inverted pyramid.