**1. Introduction**

This research investigated the changes that have occurred in Brazilian broadcast television since the digitalization process, which began in 2007 and is scheduled to end in 2023, a fact that culminated in the alteration of the way TV is produced and broadcasted. Historically, it is relevant to present part of the trajectory of the ongoing digitalization process in the country, to get an idea of its magnitude and irreversibility, due to the countless technical advantages and improvements in immediacy and also in mobility and participation.

In 2007, the process of digitalization of Brazilian television started in the city of São Paulo, as it also happened with the implementation of TV in Brazil, in 1950. Then, in 2008, 12 other cities (Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Goiânia, Manaus, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Salvador, Campinas, Belém, Teresina, Natal, Maceió, and Cuiabá) adopted the new system (HDTV), which follows the Japanese model of high definition digital TV. In 2009, another 37 cities made the migration. From this period on, the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation, and Communications has not made data available to follow the development of the process.

Among the changes, digitalization has brought the possibility of media convergence, which for Jenkins [1] refers to a situation in which multiple media systems

coexist in partnership and connection. The author proposes several possibilities to account for the dimension of this phenomenon such as alternative convergence, corporate convergence, cultural convergence, and technological convergence. Here it is recorded to get a dimension of the complexity that involves technical, social, economic, and cultural issues.

In the general context of television, due to its amplitude and the extensive universe of possibilities, this research proposed to make a specific cut focused on television journalism, in order to investigate the changes that have occurred in the way it is produced and broadcasted since digitalization. The initial hypothesis was that with the digitalization of broadcast TV in Brazil, and the advanced process of the mediatization of society, TV journalism has been reinventing itself to keep its audience captive. Since in more than 70 years, there has been a sharp drop in the audience, in the last 20 years, and a loss of hegemony, but even so, TV journalism continues to be a reference space for the viewer, due to its credibility. Therefore, for this research four networks with the largest audience in the country and their respective news programs—Globo (Jornal Nacional), SBT (Jornal do SBT), Bandeirantes (Jornal da Band), Record (Jornal da Record), and also TV Cultura1 (Jornal da Cultura)—were selected as a sample for the research analysis, for one concurrent week of each news program. In addition to the analysis of the audiovisual material, interviews with the editors-inchief/executives of each news program were conducted to investigate the production mode of each of them, before and after digitalization.

On the other hand, the Brazilian Media Survey (Pesquisa Brasileira de Mídia – PMB) [2] reveals that the Internet has been growing and surpassing some traditional media in the preference of the Brazilian population, and even though television remains in first place it shows a reduction in the number of viewers. This growing drop in audience, added to the convergence and the process of mediatization of contemporary society led some researchers to decree that the end of television was a matter of time, and with it also the object of study of this research—television journalism. But on the contrary, according to McLuhan [3], the media do not disappear but are transformed. For Thompson ([4], pp. 9–10) "new media are developed and introduced, they change the ways in which individuals relate to each other and to themselves".

PBM [2] has also shown that there is a change in the viewer's behavior when watching television, who is no longer always sitting in front of the television set, but doing other activities at the same time. Of these, 35% divide their attention between television and food, another 28% divide it with the cell phone, and 24% talk to someone else while watching television. Only 23% of those surveyed revealed that they do no other activity while watching television.

From these initial reflections, this research aimed to answer the following problem: What can be the new approaches and appropriations of telejournalism, for the production and exhibition of news, in the context of the mediatization of society, and the convergence of media and Transmedia?

The hypothesis set as starting point is that telejournalism has been using a dynamic process of participation, spreading across several platforms, characterizing a scenario of transmedia telejournalism, and can be characterized as transmedia telejournalism due to the peculiarities of the adoption of a transmedia narrative.

In a specific focus, this research dealt with the journalistic field [5], which exists within the structure of television. "The journalistic field acts, as a field, on the other

<sup>1</sup> Which was included in the research due to its innovative potential and features such as commentary and participation in its main news program—Jornal da Cultura.

### *New Social Practices on Brazilian TV: Reconfigurations in News Production and Distribution DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.113307*

fields. In other words, a field, itself increasingly dominated by commercial logic, increasingly imposes its limitations on other universes" ([5], p. 81). In television, this journalistic field is configured in the concept of telejournalism, which "is a specific kind of journalism, which produces reports and news coverage with the use of audiovisual resources. Therefore, when thinking about telejournalism, the primary element to build a report or coverage is the image" ([6], p. 3).

As a general objective, the research analyzed the context of Brazilian telejournalism, the four main broadcasters with the largest audience in the country, and São Paulo's TV Cultura<sup>2</sup> , and identified new configurations in the mode of production and exhibition of digital content.

The research has the TV news as an empirical object points out social relevance, both to the field of communication and to the mediatized society, since Brazilian TV news is a reference and presents, even in times of convergence and mediatization, good levels of credibility. The new ways of producing and consuming TV news are important because they change the hegemonic scenario—where there was only the possibility of a broadcaster (media) talking to the masses (receiver) and bring new possibilities to be explored in the practical field, such as a more effective and direct participation of the viewer, who can even controllably interfere and change the production process. It is true that there has always been participation by the general public in any form of journalism, from the early days through letters, telephone, etc. What has changed is the way and speed in which this participation can occur—digital, online, at the time of screening, or in production.
