The continuing past (Updated)

AT A lecture I gave recently to journalism students, the discussion, until now focused on the principles of news writing, was detoured by someone in the audience toward a grammatical subject – tense sequence. It is not a subject off too far, really. After all, news writing is storytelling, a narrative of a topical past, of something that has happened, or has been happening, until the moment of its telling, and, as such, set in a time that stretches across a distance from some point in the past, sometimes well back, up to the very moment that it is set down. That’s precisely the territory for tense sequence: the continuing past (a phrase I have borrowed, by the way, from Renato Constantino and his wife, Letizia, who used it as the title for a book they co-authored, thus putting it to definitely far more profound use than in our case).