This volume offers a comprehensive linguistic analysis of live text commentary, one of the most innovative online genres of modern news media. The study focuses on written sports commentaries in online newspapers that enable partial real-time audience involvement in the media text. Adopting an approach from interactional pragmatics, the book identifies the genre’s characteristic micro-linguistic features as well as its unique narrative structure. Live text commentary is shown to be a hybrid and multimodal text format – an internally complex form of media communication that combines elements of live spoken broadcasting, blogging, informal conversation and online chat. It aims to inform as well as entertain the audience: by using humour, banter and real or staged dialogue it seeks to create a sense of community among its readers – sports fans.