News fractals: linguistic and discursive properties of BBC news alerts

This study examines the content, structure and formulation of 193 online BBC news alerts (about 30,000 words). Each alert comprises an email message with a briefest news update and a link to an expanded news update. These main components include sub-components which recycle and expand on the ‘same’ content, zooming in on details of a fractal-like narrative. The alerts therefore instantiate a spiral rhetorical arrangement: within a conceptually unitary structure, news items are thus presented in incremental steps, in graphically distinct mini-texts, each displaying distinctive syntactic-discursive properties. The redundant and fragmented nature of the alerts allows newsmakers to frequently update (parts of) news items within a stable yet flexible textual structure and enables news consumers to interrupt or restart the flow of incoming information at multiple “exit/entry points” of an expandable narrative.