The dynamic configuration of non-linear texts in live blogs: a discursive approach

Abstract News platforms increasingly cover ongoing events through live blogs. In these texts, individual updates with the latest developments are issued every few minutes and added into a reverse chronology list containing everything published up to that point. Even though the fragments work as a whole – as they make up a single account of a specific event – they must, at the same time, let online users opt in and out at different points of the coverage, while providing the necessary elements for a felicitous interpretation. This article examines the discursive mechanisms that allow live blogs to do this. The discursive analysis of six reports by The Guardian and BBC News shows that cohesive links that make interpretation dependent on items that have already been mentioned, such as pronouns and conjunctions, while common within single posts, rarely ever create ties across them. The study identifies the most frequent types of cohesive devices between posts and explains how they also interact with other elements that provide them with context. Finally, I conclude that the relative autonomy the posts enjoy enable users to navigate the text in non-sequential ways, which reduces the media’s control over the discursive interaction as the final product is assembled by the reader.