ABSTRACT
News in its most basic form consists of language. It would be difficult to interpret information in purely visual modes as news, let alone fit it into knowledge structures and ideological models. The first recognized news media were textual, consisting of written or printed dispatches that were recontextualized for increasingly broad audiences. News language today includes talk as well as text: for example, radio talk uses the linguistic mode, and television news combines talk, a linguistic mode, with pictures, a visual mode, and usually with text as well. Online news both recycles other media, displaying them on text-centric or text-framed pages, and fosters new media that blend text and talk.
