NEWS MEDIA NARRATIVE IN THE VKONTAKTE SOCIAL NETWORK: DISCURSIVE FEATURES

Social networks play a special role at the present stage of journalism development being used as platforms for posting media materials on the Internet. Leading Russian media outlets have their own pages on different social networks. As social network users primarily turn to news materials, the object of this research was the news discourse presented in the most popular social network in Russia, VKontakte. In a case study of materials from RBC, RIA Novosti and Komsomolskaya Pravda, the authors of the article examined the linguistic features of a modern news media text and media discourse, in particular the expressive possibilities of the news media narrative as one of the ways to organize narrative in a media text. High-quality news content generates a steady interest in information consumption through the VKontakte social network and therefore increases the engagement index of the media outlets that are represented there. The article uses such theoretical concepts as media text, media narrative, and narrative organization of a news text. A news media text is considered in the light of the categories of narrativeness, discursiveness, hypertextuality, polycodeness, and engagement.