From Interview to News Text: A Study of Taiwan TV Political Interviews in Newspaper Reports

Mode and genre transformations are main issues in the digital era, especially apparent when news interviews are adapted into written news reports. This paper investigates how interactions in a television news interview are excerpted and adapted into a written news text in newspapers. Through a text analysis of two political interviews in Taiwan on television, and five newspaper reports based on the two interviews, this study discovered that the reporter focuses on the answers of the interviewee, and tends to extract those that fit the political news narrative and are salient in the interactions. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how the oral interview is adapted into a written news text via various discursive techniques, how interviewee answers are quoted, and how the local interview context is constructed in the news text.