Live blogging and national identity: images of now and here

Introduction. The authors describe and analyse practices of national identity in the medium created in live blogging, a new form of online news now employed by the world’s leading news editions. The purpose of the article is to explain the linguistic aspect of the narratives constructed in this genre. Materials and methods. Materials and methods include exploratory case study and content analysis of a sample of forty randomly selected live blogs, their readers’ feedback and their audience measurement. The interdisciplinary approach allows the authors to pinpoint the stylistic peculiarities of the new genre and interpret the effect in terms of social philosophy. Results. The study has shown that live blogging as a digital article covers a developing situation live by arranging small pieces of text or visual content in reverse chronological order. The authors suggest that live blogging brings forward group identities and actualizes them through a set of perception effects determined by the stylistic features of the form. Conclusion. The authors state that the possible effects of such texts on the practices of national identity include four aspects: shared group solidarity, unfolding simultaneousness of the event, identification with opinion leaders, accentuated importance of the event for group existence. The consistent characteristics of live blogging include division into lead parts in reverse chronological order with separate headlines and bylines, employing both reader-produced and professional graphic content, short paragraphs, emotional neutrality of the editor’s contribution and a set of linguistic features characteristic of publicist style in its newspaper variety.