“O personsagem é o mais importante da reportagem”: o personsagem construído na narrativa de cotidiano do Jornal Diário Gaúcho

Abstract

The character is the most important element of the news report. This statement is in the first news commandment of the Diário Gaúcho newspaper and is the starting point of this research. The goal of this work is to investigate how the construction of the character in everyday narrative in this newspaper takes place, in addition to understanding the role of the journalist-narrator, which locates and selects the characters and articulates the narrative. The literature, which seeks closer ties with narratology to list the elements that make up the narrative – including the character –, made it possible, through the analysis procedure of ten news reports that form the corpus of this study, to describe the purpose of the character to the plot and identify the effects of meaning that the journalist-narrator evokes from this element. By undertaking these procedures, we were able to find characters that together form a gallery and thus represent Diário Gaúcho's production, confirming the validity of the aforementioned first commandment. In the local news narrative published in the General section, characters are located and portrayed in their environment, in general communities on the outskirts of Porto Alegre and the Metropolitan Region. Diário Gaúcho's journalists try to include characters in their narratives that are similar to newspaper readers, in an attempt to promote identification with the audience. The characters are selected to serve as a starting point for addressing narratives about overcoming (limits, prejudices), reporting on daily dramas, common to this population segment (questioning the action of public institutions), or conducting narratives that offer entertainment or some kind of reflection – all narratives demonstrate some effect of intended meaning as commotion, encouragement, or simple delight. The characters in most narratives, play actions – which make up the news – or are affected by these actions or lack thereof. In the narrative, characters are identified by full name, age and profession. Their characterization also appears through the description and discourse of the journalistnarrator, these characters' quotes, the participation of secondary characters and even the location in which the story takes place.