Storytelling on the go

In this chapter, I draw on a practice-based heuristic that I have put forward within small stories research so as to discuss breaking news as a narrative genre that is currently carving out a significant place for itself in the everyday storying of people in technologically mediated environments. The heuristic aims at scrutinizing the inter-animations amongst ways of telling, sites and tellers, and of those I will single out three pervasive features of breaking news: the ongoing-ness of tellings that is premised on the requirement for the recency of events; the portability of the stories in different environments (e.g. from online to offline and vice versa); the multiple tellership and co-construction of tellings. On the basis of these features, I address the issue of how the study of breaking news can inform the current thinking around certain longstanding concerns of narrative analysis such as tellability (the story “worth telling”) and reflection (distance) in the telling of the past.