In this paper we describe an extractive method of creating very short summaries or gists that capture the essence of a news story using a linguistic technique called lexical chaining. The recent interest in robust gisting and title generation techniques originates from a need to improve the indexing and browsing capabilities of interactive digital multimedia systems. More specifically these systems deal with streams of continuous data, like a news programme, that require further annotation before they can be presented to the user in a meaningful way. We automatically evaluate the performance of our lexical chaining-based gister with respect to four baseline extractive gisting methods on a collection of closed caption material taken from a series of news broadcasts. We also report results of a human-based evaluation of summary quality. Our results show that our novel lexical chaining approach to this problem outperforms standard extractive gisting methods.