News items constitute a basic genre of the press and the media. One type of content provided by mobile phone companies on a subscription basis is sms news service. Such news items belong to a novel form of mass communication known as new media (polimedia or metamedia), and accordingly they modify our concept and definition of 'news item'. This paper surveys the characteristics of sms news on the basis of twelve criteria of linguistic pragmatic analysis. Thus, a number of features are revealed that fit written language, spoken language, or else, in a modified form, the medium of sms, also known as secondary written language. Such features include the relativisation of orthography, the lack of headlines, the avoidance of repetition, various spoken-language phenomena, misassociation, ambiguity. In sum, sms communication indeed produces a new from of existence for language, leading to linguistic changes not only in private communication but also in media communication.