Construction of Entertainment News as a Collaborative and Negotiated Communication and Discourse: An Autoethnographic Study

Abstract

The qualitative study investigated how Entertainment news as a discourse and its meaning come into being. It also interrogated the roles of editorial and Public Relations and Corporate Communications personalities who take part in it, the communication systems and the power relations that enact and shape the construction of Entertainment news. Utilizing analytic autoethnography and thematic analysis, the 10 themes that emerged were “Source” of the “source” of Entertainment news; What and who lands on the Entertainment page; The avenues and sites for Entertainment news; What questions to ask and get to ask; Questions and answers as basis for Entertainment news; The culture of giving; The writer’s making sense of Entertainment event; Entertainment narratives: Events to personalities; Stories people are talking about and whose voice; and New way of gathering and writing Entertainment news. They also revealed different points of communication, collaboration, negotiation and tension in relation to the construction of Entertainment news.

Themes were based on the recollections and experiences of the researcher and the five other informants. In the interplay of their voices, the researcher’s perspective took the lead in understanding how Entertainment news emerges. Using Fairclough and Foucault’s conceptions of discourse and Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality as lenses, the study analyzed and discussed Entertainment news, from the text and discursive levels to the social practice level and encompassing surfaces of emergence and authorities of deliminations, and the habitualization, institutionalization and legitimation of practices and policies. The qualitative study legitimizes the value of Entertainment news and that it is never a neutral site of communication and discourse.