News text: genre transformation

The article considers a news text as a secondary type of text where news content undergoes modifications as a result of humorous interpretation. New trends in media coverage, which lead to a change in its format and linguistic content, are analyzed. The creation of a secondary news text / genre is shown as performed through transforming the main (primary) news text. The secondary media text belongs to the comic picture of the world, the modeling of which becomes possible due to various means of the comic which fulfill social-critical, aesthetic and entertainment functions. The empirical material of the study comprises 530 news texts telecast at the beginning of the program “Evening Urgant” on Channel One in 2017-2020. The identified mechanism of news transformation includes the use of irony, sarcasm, comic exaggeration and understatement, references to precedent phenomena, the techniques of allegory, comic dissonance and comic surprise, comic exposure, etc. The analysis of the news transformation mechanism revealed a reduction in the primary news component with a simultaneous “build-up” of a pragmatic component through the use of various means and techniques of the comic. This leads to the construction of a secondary news text, which, in turn, is characterized by a recombined semantic content and subjective interpretation of the primary news piece.