The hybrid media environment integrates elements of traditional and digital media, and reshapes production and distribution practices in accordance with the changing audience habits. These processes affect all media, including local outlets, which adopt new technologies, adapt production approaches and operate within a multiplatform environment. Such transformations are also evident in local radio programmes, which this Dissertation analyses through the concept of media convergence and the related processes of remediation and hybridisation. In this context, hybridisation encompasses not only technological transfers of media content across platforms, but also the broader professional and social dynamics of the digital media environment. The Dissertation focuses on analysing these transformations at the level of production practices and genre structures in the news programmes of Slovenian local radio stations. The research is based on methodological triangulation within a digital ethnography framework, including participant observation, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and an analysis of the transfer of genre elements within a corpus of journalistic texts. The findings demonstrate that journalistic production and distribution practices have become distinctly hybrid, and adapted to the intermedial logic of the multiplatform environment. Hybrid production involves the complex creation of content for multiple channels, used convergently yet asynchronously across different production and distribution contexts. Within convergent newsrooms, radio news genres are reconfigured in accordance with the affordances and constraints of individual platforms. Genre transitions are no longer linear, but occur in parallel, and involve multiple formal, structural and stylistic adaptations. Despite these transformations, local radio maintains its media specificity, strong connection to the local community, and its important informational role. The Dissertation contributes to the understanding of hybridisation in local radio journalism and the transformation of radio news genres. It introduces an original analytical approach to examining the transfer of genre elements between journalistic texts intended for different channels of distribution.
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