Breaking News

BBC World, Saturday 11 March.

'Milosevic dies in his cell' was the headline that greeted me as I opened my internet browser on Saturday 11 March.

I get most of my 'news' now from the internet, toggling between windows and surfing sites, glancing at headlines almost every time I open my browser or check my mail. It's a long way from the hourly 'bulletin of world news' which used to regulate my home time as a surrogate clock, and the rousing fanfare and spinning globe of the BBC 'Six O'clock News' which throughout my childhood was always associated with early evening and - usually - homework still to be done.

Getting 'news', like so many other literacy practices, has become rhythmic. News has escaped ritualised time-slots and become boundless. It's always there, round the clock, constantly updated before our eyes, non-stop waves of words and images breaking and merging. It is less of an event and more of a rhythm.

It's also a design feature. CNN accompanies you in lifts in posh US hotels. News-bites are wrapped electronically around buildings. You can get 'your news' on SMS, on blogs, by email, on 24-hour channels. The whole notion of a 'bulletin' (from the Italian word 'bulletta', meaning 'passport', a diminutive of 'bulla', or 'seal') has become deregulated, dispersed, relieved of its official duties.

Practices become so much a part of the fabric of living that perhaps we only realise them when something mementous happens and the normal rhythm is suspended. I can just about remember 'breaking news' before CNN and the internet. I remember my brother and I gasping as children's TV went blank and a voice said:

'We interrupt this programme for a news flash. From New York it has been reported that John Lennon has been shot dead.'

The news of Milosevic's death in his cell in Scheveningen did break into my day and suspend its normal Saturday morning rhythm. For family and work reasons my life (our lives) have been bound up with his, or I should say the damage he caused.

But getting this news proved inseparable from the medium in which I got it: the internet. Within a few minutes I was toggling between different news sites around the world, comparing the way in which the event was being reported, was becoming 'news'. Only after a while did I turn to the TV news and its endlessly revolving archive footage of Milosevic in court at the Hague or, in his arrogant heyday, making speeches to the masses at flag-filled rallies in Serbia.

My daughter, who was also aware of the momentousness of the day, took the photo above. It's interesting how word competes with image in this screen capture. There is the 'breaking news' headline. But just beneath that is a bit of sports news, reminding us that there are other stories coming up, we have a menu of news to choose from. And beneath that, the endlessly moving crawler text of the markets. The TV screen moves closer to the web space. Word and image come into ever closer and more dynamic contact with each other.

As this Saturday in March unfolded, words and images passed in and out of each other. The media longed for new images - but there were hardly any, except for a blustery photo opportunity by Milosevic's lawyer outside the ICTY gates. But there was a single press release - full of errors, clearly not revised - released by the ICTY. I watched the words spin their way around the world, inserted hungrily in seconds into updates, news reports, blogs and web sites as quotations.

Somehow, the grammatical mistakes in the press release seemed to create rumours and uncertainty. Rather than copy-pasting from the official press release journalists were clearly filling in the gaps with their own words, 'correcting' the mistakes and coming up with new phrases.

And one word - inexplicably chosen by the person who wrote the press release - seemed to take on a theatrical life of its own as it went on its global way of multiple citations: 'Lifeless'. Why 'lifeless'? Why not 'dead'? Why was Milosevic 'lifeless' and not 'dead'? So began several days of wild rumour.

News is always multimodal, word and image interweaving. Sometimes it's image that takes over, silencing language. At other times it all comes down to words.