# Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5/1, 2001: 50±72 Risk news in the world of Internet newsgroups 1 Kay Richardson University of Liverpool, United Kingdom The coming of the Internet has provided those who are able to bene®t from it new ways of giving and seeking information. These new contexts of commun- ication include newsgroups, very much a text-based form of interaction with little visual enhancement. In the new era of `risk society' Beck 1992) people make use of newsgroups to talk about the risks which now confront the world, in their pursuit of trustworthy information and informants. Using the aair of Mad Cow Disease BSE), with particular reference to the crisis in 1996, this article explores the dynamics of news exchange via the newsgroups as a process which is Interactive, International, Interested and Intertextual. These char- acteristics result in a form of discourse through which participants engage in the interpersonal social construction of risk. The credibility of the proposition that BSE poses a health risk to humans is the focus of their discussions: they are concerned with the nature of the evidence for that proposition and with the reliability of the sources responsible for endorsing it. KEYWORDS: Newsgroups, risk, discourse, news, BSE This paper is concerned with the use made of Internet newsgroups to participate in `risk talk', with reference to the aair of Mad Cow Disease and in particular to the `crisis moment' in that aair, March 20th 1996. The 1996 crisis occurred when, acting on scienti®c advice, the British Government declared that it now endorsed the view that the cattle disease BSE Bovine Spongiform Encephalo- pathy, or Mad Cow Disease) could cross the species barrier via infected meat and cause the death from CJD Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease) of human beings who ate that meat. The Government had previously denied any such risk to human health. In this paper I examine how newsgroup interaction between March 20th and March 26th 1996 acted as a conduit for the exchange of crisis news amongst individuals. The coming of the Internet has provided those who are able to bene®t from it new ways of `®nding out'; new ways of giving and seeking information. Foremost among these are websites and newsgroups: the most well-developed and easy to use fora in the era of the Internet. As receivers of information, people who have become sceptical of mass media, or sceptical of those who