The article examines the peculiarities of the oral news genre with special emphasis on meaningful differences from its written form. Apart from the speech pattern, the reported features are determined by the limitations of the addressee’s perception under the conditions of the formal remote communication. It is highlighted that the journalist most often doesn’t know these socalled “pitfalls” or simply is not paying attention to them at the moment of speaking. Each of these “pitfalls” is studied in detail. Some of them are typical to the news genre in general: for instance, almost complete absence of a logical connection between sentences (they act as separate fragments) and misunderstanding of the addressee’s ability to fully perceive the terms, borrowed words and proper names. but they also intensify their negative significance in the oral news genre.