Characteristic of the digital news story genre

The article deals with the genre of news stories clustering around the theme of coronavirus infection in the English electronic newspaper The Daily Mail. The purpose of the paper is to systematize the main characteristics of various news stories within the selected topic. The key genre-forming features of electronic news stories are the explicit nature of authorship, a wide range of readers, synchronous and asynchronous comments. There is a description of three news stories with various structures – an inverted pyramid, an hourglass and a multimedia story. It has been determined that such kinds of news stories combine different types of information (factual, probabilistic, normative, program and evaluative); a significant event is described by alternating a verbal text and visual material, which is represented by illustrations, video segments and infographics. Interactivity is presented at two levels – on the one hand, in the interaction between a reader and a news story, on the other hand, between several news stories, divided by time, but written within the same topic. Key thematic lexis captures the theme of the text, and synonymic sets with literary and informal lexical units diversify the narrative and reduce the distance between the electronic newspaper and its audience.