Giulia Cecchettin’s feminicide in the Italian online press: How headlines changed the narrative, if they did at all

Giulia Cecchettin’s feminicide, which took place in Italy in November 2023, raised high media attention. Our research accounts for how it was covered by the national online press, and whether and how news reporting narratives differed from those about previous feminicides. Driven by both literature on the news framing of gender-based violence and linguistic studies on communicative functions of implicit strategies, we analyzed the headlines and subheadings concerning Cecchettin’s feminicide that were published online by the newspaper leading the case. We replicated the analyses on a control corpus including the online headlines and subheadings dedicated by the same newspaper to Giulia Tramontano’s feminicide, which took place in May 2023. Results indicate that the description of both the victim and the perpetrator is less stereotypical (though still anchored in a telenovela-style episodic narrative) in the coverage of the Cecchettin case, which, however, exacerbates the instrumental spectacularization of feminicide for clickbait purposes.