6–10 Jun 2022
Tübingen
Europe/Berlin timezone

Informing about sports in times of pandemic. How did L’Equipe reframed its relationship with its readers during COVID-19 lockdown.

10 Jun 2022, 09:40
20m

Speaker

Fabien Wille

Description

On March 17th of 2020, France went into two months of total lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a consequence, all sports competitions and events were frozen or cancelled, which deprived French newspaper L’Equipe of its main source of news. Nonetheless, its editorial board decided to keep working. But absent any sporting event, what could the only French sports daily inform about in these unprecedented times? To answer this question, we will focus on the sixty front pages L’Equipe issued between March 13th and May 11th, when France came out of its first lockdown. We will pay particular attention to the headlines, photographs and to the way these items are displayed on the front pages. In that purpose, our analysis will be based on the concept of « reader-writer contract » (Veron, 1985), which can be defined as « the staging, on the semiotic scene of a press organ, of two entities, an emittor and a receptor, who are bound together by a specific relationship taking place in a specific space comparable to a universe of common references interpreted simultaneously by the emittor and the receptor » (Granier, 2011).
Considering that « every media builds its own discourse according to the representation it has of its own audience » (Tétu, 2004), the « reader-writer contract » between L’Equipe and its readers became null and void in the critical context of a pandemic. The newspaper thus had to issue a new contract, piecing together past knowledge – the readers’ alleged expectations – and necessary adaptations to an uncharted territory – the total absence of sporting events.

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