Nostalgie dell’oralità: l’intervista giornalistica scritta

This paper discusses some distinctive aspects of the written news-interview as it is commonly used (and overused) in Italian weeklies and newspapers. As a textual genre, a written interview shows an interesting reworking from an original spoken mode to a written mode that must still keep a ‘flavour’ of oral speech. All the structural and discursive changes that this type of reconstructed text requires are hardly compatible with the use of direct speech, as a verbatim mode of reporting. Nevertheless, the Italian written news-interview is usually rendered as a clear-cut succession of questions and answers reported through direct speech, no matter how many linguistic and textual changes have been carried out as a whole on the original spoken text. The Italian usage thus offers a striking contrast with different journalistic traditions, where the interpretative side of reporting is usually performed by journalists through the use of indirect speech or through explicit authorial comments, and where direct speech always implies a verbatim rendition of the news-maker’s original words.