Time and Media: How the Internet Changed Time and Thereby Changed Journalism (Part 1)
Major-media journalism refuses to acknowledge new time restrictions at its own peril.
Introduction
What is the time of news?
It may sound like the sort of question the Cheshire Cat asked Alice in Wonderland, but it’s absolutely essentially to the future of journalism. The internet changed how we understanding time, space, and memory, and if journalism going forward doesn’t reflect these sea changes, it will collapse as a professional, institutionalized enterprise.
First, let’s consider the different ways we might think about time as it relates to journalism, not just in the digital age but generally:
The time it takes to research, write, edit, and publish hard-news reportage.
The time during which a given piece of news is visible to a given news consumer.
The time such a reader devotes to consuming that single piece of news.
The time a given piece of news remains news (either “breaking” or generally).
The time a given piece of news remains part of our collective news archive.
All of these “time-values” have changed dramatically in the digital age, yet journalism has adapted appropriately to none of them—and therein lies a major danger facing journalism today. So let’s address each of the five items above in turn.
Research, Writing, Editing and Publishing News
Comparatively speaking, this time-value is the least affected by the internet, as while digital research has sped up the research process substantially, staffing levels at media organizations have fallen sufficiently that it cannot be said that today’s reporters must or can work less diligently than their predecessors from the pre-digital age. Of course much of the work of a hard-news reporter—I’m putting aside the several dozen other genres of journalism for a moment—involves real-time, face-to-face interactions (or in some cases calls) in much the same vein as the “shoe-leather” investigative reporting of the 1970s. Yes, reporters can now use email, but it’s debatable whether email is a faster or more efficient use of one’s time than the phone (though admittedly the former has the benefit of creating a contemporaneous record, without the need for extensive handwritten notes). Just so, computers may be faster than typewriters, and editing by computer may be easier than editing by hand, but the time differentials that are in play here are minimal. Digital publication is faster and cheaper than having to print everything via the massive machinery of a printing press, and such publication certainly affects how news is consumed—more on that below—but we can’t say that this new mode of publication fundamentally changes reporting protocols themselves.
Where the digital age really transforms the time required by conventional reporting protocols is the second element of journalism’s core (“OATH”) principles (Objectivity, Accuracy, Transparency, and Honesty). Today’s reporters have it within their power to be more accurate in their reporting by honoring that component of the Accuracy principle sometimes referred to as “prior report.” In simple terms, today’s reporters can with relative ease research the topics they’re reporting on digitally to ensure that they are not reproducing the work of others or—as importantly—failing to infuse their reporting with all the prior reporting that provides critical context for any new work.
In the past, reporters might read a newspaper or two on a semi-regular basis to keep up with the writing of those reporters at other outlets working the same news beat, but doing much more was time-consuming and (for that matter) less essential than it is today because yesterday’s news consumers had such brand loyalty that they tended to stick with a small number of news sources. In other words, they’d be unlikely to catch it if the reporters they followed were accidentally or negligently duplicating others’ work or failing to consider prior reporting in framing their own reportage.
Google News changed everything, as it made it possible for reporters to access prior reports on the topics they’re working on almost instantaneously. With the advent of high-speed internet and powerful internet-wide search engines, it became difficult for reporters to argue that they needn’t be intimately familiar with the work of same-beat reporters not just domestically but internationally. And because consumers of news can read Google News as easily as their favorite reporters can—or simply read their own social media feeds, which are likely to be filled with news articles—the odds that a reporter’s audience has familiarity with major “prior reports” on a given news topic is actually surprisingly high. Their expectation of reporters’ awareness of such reports changes accordingly.
Unfortunately, despite all this, where the rubber meets the road we’re just not seeing better accuracy in news reporting than we saw in the 1970s. There isn’t significant evidence that reporters across the board have made it a habit—a new convention—to be experts in what their same-beat peers are reporting domestically or internationally. Reduced staffing levels and the fact that deadlines have only become more urgent and invasive in the era of wall-to-wall cable news means that reporters may have the tech to see prior reports in their area of specialization, but don’t necessarily have the time in their schedule to do so.
I’ve written in the past about how this development led to the rise of metajournalism—the practice of curatorial journalists compiling published major-media reports into coherent narratives—but also how it led to hostility directed at metajournalists by conventional reporters, as the former now regularly challenge (implictly) the accuracy of work done by the latter by showing that a given reporter failed to comprehensively assess prior reporting before publishing their own original work.
The solution here is obvious, of course: while time can’t be added into the work day of today’s reporters, they can see metajournalists as collaborators and helpmeets rather than cruel, reckless, presumptuous, interloping overlords. Reporters can acknowledge that the news archive is bigger and more accessible and more widely understood by news consumers than ever before, even as they also acknowledge that they don’t have additional time to access that archive that they didn’t have before; under circumstances like these, the invention of metajournalistic interventions in conventional reporting can be seen as a blessing.
{Note: In Part 2 of this series, I consider the “visibility window”—the question of how long a given piece of breaking news is readily visible to the average news consumer in the digital age.}