Characteristics of Interviews in Local Online Media in Southern Serbia

Abstract

The interview, as a journalistic genre, according to Dušan Slavković, can be classical, improvised and combined (Slavković, 1988). This classification of interviews was created in the era of dominant print, radio and television media. In the context of the growing number of online media, the question arises whether the traditional classification of interviews is also applied in digital journalism. In this paper, we deal with the analysis of interviews as a journalistic genre in local online media in the south of Serbia, through a multiple case study. The analysis includes three media outlets that have an “Interview” section: Slobodna reč from Vranje, Jugmedia from Leskovac and Pirotske vesti from Pirot. The aim of this paper is to investigate the frequency of publishing interviews in the local online media, dominant topics and types of interviews, as well as who the most frequent interviewees are and their areas of expertise. The time frame of the research is from January 1, 2023 to December 31,2023. The unit of research analysis is each individually published interview in the mentioned local online media. The corpus of analyzed interviews is 22 (Slobodna reč- 8; Jugmedia - 9; Pirotske vesti - 5). The findings of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the case study show that in the analyzed period, local online media varied in the frequency of publishing interviews, as well as that the classic interview is the most represented type. The dominant topics in the interviews of the online media Slobodna reč and Pirotske vesti are topics about culture, while Jugmedia has the most interviews related to education. The interlocutors in these interviews mostly come from the same fields as the topics being discussed.