oa Cross-platform television: Superliveness, metadiscourse and complex audience orientation in a sports journalism production on the web

This article presents a close analysis of interactions in cross-media formats with a specific focus on how television ‘is done’ on the web by established sports broadcasters who are used to producing traditional sports television. It will be argued that the web platform promotes significantly altered audience-oriented behaviours compared to traditional television, and that the web ultimately both calls for and produces a new kind of sociability in relation to audiences. It will be proposed in the discussion that this new kind of sociability will have an increasing impact also on how traditional television ‘is done’. The article makes use of data from the sports genre that is normally associated with ‘lighter entertainment’. Therefore the results may not be immediately applicable to how other types of journalistic genres tackle the communicative challenges of new media. However, it will be argued that sports journalism may well be thought of as a frontrunner when it comes to adapting to increasingly ‘sociable’ communicative modes of address. The analysis of web interactions focuses around three overarching audience orientations that are promoted in the web context: superliveness, metadiscourse and complex audience orientation(s). Taken together, these orientations constitute ‘a new kind of sociability’.