The Narrative Analysis Of Convergent Journalism

Convergent journalism is a kind of diversified news reporting model, featured in multi-media reporting and based on the rapid development of network technology and digital technology in the new era. It combines text, image, sound, video, animation, digital simulation and other media forms. By this way, visual expressions have been greatly enriched and communication effect has been improved to a large degree. Therefore, it’s a brand-new reporting trend which in line with the social development and the needs of the public. The multi-media features bring convergent journalism’s narration structure complexity and make the convergent journalism having the need to balance and interact a variety of media so that to obtain the integration of narration.On the one hand, convergent journalism catches a quite fast development, but on the other hand, there is a lack of adequate theoretical system and support concerning convergent journalism narration. Under such circumstance, this article attempts to make a preliminary exploration for the building of convergent journalism narratology. The author sets the convergent journalism as the analysis object and utilizes the Narratology general principles and basic concepts as a guide to explore the unique narrative rules of convergent journalism narratology. During the theoretical exploration, the Pulitzer winner news "Snow Fall" enters as a practical case study in order to promote the combination of theory and practice. The articles starts on the basis of the Narratology’s important concepts and principles, for instance, narrative voice, narrative perspective, the content and form, narrative time transformation and spatial expression, corresponds these elements with the multi-media expressions of convergent journalism and analyzes one by one in a detailed and in-depth way. The author points out that the convergent journalism, as a readable and watchable styling narration form, has a great difference and advantages compared with the traditional news.These narrative advantages, conferred by the effective combination of multi-media, are mainly in the following aspects:a variety of narrative voices and narrative perspectives forms the condition of polyphonic narration and enriches the narration level; the contents of news extends to many directions with a centralized theme; the news presentation forms includes not only text, but also image, video and other multimedia; the narrative time transformation obtains multi-media expression; spatial text (based on the Internet) is provided with a large capacity for different kinds of contents and the most important advantage is that the visual storytelling narration method brings strong expressive force and attractiveness. The above-mentioned advantages are the coming future research directions of convergent journalism and define the differences with the traditional narrative way of news.In addition, as the convergent journalism is a new-emergent multi-media narrative model, the text-based classical narration theory unavoidably incompetent or not appropriate enough in analyzing other non-text medium and multi-media combination. Regarding this circumstance, this article accordingly expands or deepens some relevant statements or concepts in the process of applying the classical narratology. For instance, the author makes an analysis of similarities and differences about the "implied author" in the classical narratology and the super narrator in the convergent journalism, and changes direction of narrative space research from the news story actual space to the Internet text space. What’s more, the writer adds a new concept,visual and auditory narration, to the convergent journalism narratology. Effcient explorations into the selection of visual-auditory issues, the effectiveness of visual-auditory expression and the visualized spatial layout have been made through the deep and profound combination with the "Snow Fall" case.