Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt Zizi Papacharissi 1 & Maria de Fatima Oliveira 2 1 Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA 2 Prime Research, New York City, NY, USA This study traces the rhythms of news storytelling on Twitter via the #egypt hashtag. Using computational discourse analysis, we examine news values and the form of news exhibited in #egypt from January 25 to February 25, 2011, pre- and post-resignation of Hosni Mubarak. Results point to a hybridity of old and newer news values, with emphasis on the drama of instantaneity, the crowdsourcing of elites, solidarity, and ambience. The resulting stream of news combines news, opinion, and emotion to the point where discerning one from the other is difficult and doing so misses the point. We offer a theory of affective news to explain the distinctive character of content produced by networked publics in times of political crisis. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01630.x Blogs and microblogs rise to prominence as news disseminators when access to mainstream news and/or other communication media is restricted or blocked (Howard, 2011; Papacharissi, 2010). The Egyptian protests that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak were organized through a complex network that combined heavy Twitter and Facebook use with other forms of interpersonal communication. During this period, access to mainstream media was variably blocked, foreign and native journalists were intimidated, and access to the Internet was controlled and eventually shut down. Twitter, however, provided a continuous stream of events in real time throughout the crisis. This study explores the use of Twitter as a news reporting mechanism during the Egyptian uprising. This research is relevant to contemporary directions in communication for a variety of reasons. First, at a time when most news networks are forced to shut down foreign bureaus due to financial constraints, news feeds produced by citizens committing acts of journalism complement or substitute mainstream media reporting. Studying the shape news takes as it is broadcast through collaboratively generated news streams could help us understand evolving paradigms in journalism. Second, these news feeds become of central importance to both producers and consumers of news, especially when other Corresponding author: Zizi Papacharissi; e-mail: zizi@uic.edu 266 Journal of Communication 62 (2012) 266–282  2012 International Communication Association