This paper proposes a reception-oriented and discursive concept of genre by using the example of „Wutreden“, i. e. public and medially distributed rants and their coverage in (online) media and Web 2.0. On the basis of a corpus of video recordings and transcriptions of Wutreden as well as comments made by journalists and users, it is shown that neither their linguistic features nor their situational functions qualify Wutreden as a distinct genre. Rather, the medial and internetbased recontextualisations of Wutreden build an orienting framework for the reception of discourse. It is these recontextualisations that put disparate speech events in order, so that they can be received as instances of one single genre. The analysis of accompanying discourse like media reports, user comments, and tweets as well as the multimodal surroundings of the respective videos shows, that such documents of reception reflect a genre awareness of Wutreden which will shape their reception as well as the follow-up discourse. The increase of Wutreden in the recent past as appears to be as a result of altered conditions of reception in online environments – conditions, which the linguistic study of genre and genre change within digital media should not neglect.