Multimodal Strategies Used by Students in the Transmedial Reformulations of Constructive News for Italian Viewers

This chapter enquires into the transmedial edits of a selected corpus of constructive news items which were produced by a number of Italian postgraduate students in masters degrees in “Digital Communication, Media, Journalism” and “Literatures”. The objects of analysis were produced in the course of a workshop on the production and reproduction of news to be shared over the Internet. First, participants were asked to select a corpus of constructive news items that could be of interest to Italian readers. Then, they had to reformulate the English source versions into Italian by means of a transmedial approach. Accordingly, they were expected to devise a format that is appropriate for the transmission of texts through social media news sites. This chapter examines the linguistic and extralinguistic strategies that characterise the subjects’ retextualisations, whose main aim is to attract viewers’ interest before presenting the constructive news content to them. The analysis foregrounds the meaning-making nature of the interaction between images, sound and words in order to create viral text types – such as Instagram posts, memes, and reels – as well as to convey constructive messages to their implied receivers.