‘How come there’s always exactly enough news to fill the pages of the newspaper?” The old joke has particular resonance in newsrooms at this time of year, as they struggle to fill the yawning voids of late summer.
Stories that might merit a brief report in October get a half-page spread in August; faraway disasters receive extra attention; the slightest squeak from a frontline politician merits in-depth analysis.
For journalists, this August slump is a predictable part of the “news cycle”, that seemingly immutable entity dictated partly by seasonal landmarks such as parliamentary recesses and court calendars, but also by internal factors like TV schedules and the printing and delivery of daily newspapers.
Academic research into the culture and practice of American newspapers in the 1970s revealed that decisions on what did or did not get into the paper were influenced more by the demands of the production schedule than by any other single factor.
The news cycle, in other words, was an artificial construct manufactured by media companies, largely for their own purposes. However, it did also bring coherence, satisfying the human need for narrative storytelling.
Now that many people get their news via social media on mobile phones, the rhythms of the traditional news cycle are ruptured irreparably.
This week, media theorist Frederic Filloux argues that the consequences of this shift will be as stark as the impact of climate change on the planet.
“Exactly like climate change keeps bringing more droughts and floods, the way news is consumed on social will lead to greater instability and accidents,” he writes, going on to cite the rise of Donald Trump and the “accident” of Brexit as examples of the effect of the “social tsunami”.
Informed analysis
“For news, 10 or 15 years ago, the main accelerator was live television,” Filloux points out. “The rest of the journalistic crowd was free to dig deeper, to take the time to put things in perspective and provide informed analysis.”
The news cycle now, he says, has become “faster and denser, with a greater amplitude”.
Some of this is obvious: we find out about events much more quickly and we are rapidly inundated with often repetitive coverage of them. The idea of “amplitude” is more interesting. Filloux uses the word to mean the level of anger, fear and other emotions generated by any news story today.
As the lifespan of the story is compressed, the amplitude increases, driven by the echo chamber of social sharing and commenting. “Today, we love and hate at a much faster pace than ever before, and more intensely,” he says.
For some, this transformation is a positive development. They argue that the people formerly known as the audience (readers and viewers) have taken control from self- appointed media gatekeepers (editors) and other elites.
Stories which were deliberately hidden can now be uncovered. However, there is not much sign as yet of an engaged citizenry holding power to account and bearing witness to the truth.
Self-publishing tools and platforms have widened the range of voices and information sources, but the reality of social media interaction with news and current affairs seems closer to what Filloux describes – an amped-up world of instant opinions and filter bubbles within which like- minded people never have their views challenged.
Failure to adapt
Filloux excoriates established media companies for their failure, as he sees it, to adapt quickly enough to this transformation, failing to invest in new technologies and dragging their heels when it came to changing their own internal cultures.
It is a grim assessment, rendered bleaker by his prediction that print media, in particular, has lost the battle for audiences and will not have the resources to claw them back.
The fact is though they could not have held back against the trends he describes. The efforts made by some companies to adapt by producing increasingly vast quantities of increasingly shallow “stories” tailored for social sharing have contributed to the process he deplores, while not solving the fundamental problem of a broken business model.
For media organisations that plan to survive, and therefore take their digital mission seriously, the challenge is this. If the traditional news cycle is dead, what replaces it? As the simple certainties imposed by print deadlines and broadcast time slots ebb away, how do news organisations structure their output? And if you don’t have to fill a page all the way to the edge any more, where do you stop? The internet is infinite; the trick may finally lie in knowing what to leave out.
Hugh Linehan is Irish Times Culture Editor