Narrative of vicarious experience in broadcast news: A linguistic ethnographic approach to semiotic mediations in the newsroom

Abstract Drawing on linguistic ethnography, narrative analysis and membership categorization analysis, this paper investigates the media practitioners' relationship with vicarious experiences throughout the making of a television news story. From the selection of the topic in the morning editorial meetings to the joint construction of the final report by a journalist and a cutter, the paper explores how others' experiences are mediated by various semiotic means. On the one hand, it investigates how others' experiences circulate through a news-making production process, which impacts on their mediatization. On the other hand, it analyses how the media practitioners' relationship with others' experiences relates to different modes of mediation: talk and text mediations as well as footage mediation. By doing so, the paper shifts from a point of view that focuses on the narrative of vicarious experience as the retelling of other people's stories to a perspective that looks at the narrative of vicarious experience as the multimodal and embodied practice of recounting others' experiences from verbal depictions, embodiments and technological captures of what happened and what was lived.