A Critical Genre Analysis of Social Media News Reporting: The Case of Instagram

This thesis explores the relatively novel world of Instagram news reporting through a genre perspective, seeking to comprehensively understand its construction, interpretation, and exploitation. Employing Bhatia’s (2017) Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) as a theoretical foundation, I consider text-internal (textual) and text-external (contextual) dimensions as configurations of genre complementing and giving rise to one another to create meaning and identity. I push beyond the common focus of examining generic structures in English for Specific Purpose (ESP)-informed genre studies, accounting also for the real-world/professional realm in which a specific genre is situated. In addition to establishing the text-internal components of Instagram news reporting, I consolidate and extend the understanding of and motivation for the construction of the professional actions that the analysed genre is tethered to. My data consists of Instagram posts from three leading and popular English-medium news agencies BBC News UK, The New Zealand Herald, and The Star Malaysia. The operationalisation of my text-internal investigation involves 1) dissecting the captions (text) using Swales' (2004) Move Analysis, 2) examining the main visual (image) by adopting Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2006) Visual Grammar and, 3) analysing the interactive elements (e.g. like, comment, share buttons) utilising Adami's (2015) Interactivity framework. For my text-external exploration, I draw on expert insights, interviewing social media editors from the three respective news agencies to unpack the professional practices of social media journalists (SMJs). To account for the audience/user perspective, I conducted a comment thread analysis, examining how news consumers engage with news content, journalists, and other users within the discourse space. The text-internal findings show that the text, image, and interactive elements are strongly integrated and interdependent, working together to construct the boundaries, meaning and identity of Instagram news reporting as a genre. Using the caption as a starting point, I determine the rhetorical moves and functions as fulfilling a two-fold communicative purpose: to inform and persuade the audience. Lexicogrammatical devices such as inclusive pronouns, modals, questions, and directives are utilised to accomplish these rhetorical purposes. Extending my analysis multimodally, the visual findings demonstrate that the image (main visual) particularly reinforces audience engagement, further bolstering the persuasive dimension of the genre. While the text and image collaborate to appeal, the main visual plays a more prominent role in achieving this function. With interactivity, the text-image is an ensemble indicating the centrality of audience engagement and the author-audience power dynamics. Contextually, the expert insights and user perspectives further highlight the prioritisation of audience in news making, indexing the commercial aspect of their professional goals. This instantiation is also embodied in the different modes of the Instagram news ensemble as an expression of the SMJs’ professional practices. The SMJs legitimise their status and maintain professional authority by actively enacting their expert-gatekeeper self while users strive for the gatekeeping role to level the field of power. The SMJs’ enactment is a strategy to negotiate the constant tension between their contesting goals of revenue-making and maintaining professionalism. At a wider level, these goals and practices are governed by implicit forces such as journalistic ideologies, Instagram affordances and digital news conventions. Intrinsically linked, these practices and forces enable SMJs as the author to wield more power and privilege, strengthening journalism's institutional authority.

Taken together, the textual and contextual findings allude to a complex, dynamic, and transient two-way configuration between the internal, external, and implicit constituents of the analysed genre. I capture this outlook as a defining nature of Instagram news reporting. My study firmly affirms the need to acknowledge and unpack the different interdependent genre configurations to decipher genre meaning and identity in its entirety, simultaneously consolidating Bhatia’s (2017) notion of criticality. These genre insights benefit academics, social media (journalism) professionals and members of society, allowing us to question and evaluate news stories that subtly impact our beliefs and values, and where necessary, challenge narratives that enable social injustices.