The talk focuses on the development of news discourse on the internet, tracking some of the changes that online news has undergone over the past 25 years. Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective on the online news genre, the talk identifies several phases in its general development and focuses on the specific phenomenon of live online news. Based on data from political news and sports coverage, several types of live news are identified together with their micro- and macro-linguistic features, which include a distinct narrative structure, specific intertextuality and audience-directed interactivity. It is argued that liveness - as the compression of the space between a news event and its journalistic coverage - has brought about a radical transformation of the traditional, canonical news style.