60/60/24/7

After struggling mightily with the concept of updating their Web sites more than once a day, newspapers are finally figuring out what cable news networks and all-news radio stations have known for years: There's an audience for constantly updated news. It may not be a huge audience, but it's there--and keeping the news fresh keeps the site looking fresh for every site visitor.

Using news blogs, Twitter and other tools, an increasing number of sites are providing visitors with ever-more-frequent and in some cases real-time updates of breaking news. You've heard of the 24/7 news cycle? This is the 60/60/24/7 cycle, where every second of every minute of every hour counts. Publish or perish (or is it tweet or be tweeted?).

Some examples:

• Twitter, of course, is the current flavor of the month for quick-news junkies, and has been useful for on-the-spot reports–many from onlookers rather than journalists–on fast-moving stories like the Mumbai terror attacks and the recent California wildfires. In my view, Twitter is still a blunt instrument, with a horrible signal-to-noise ratio and a following that may be too insular among newsies (very few "regular" readers know what it is). And it has no visible business model, as Valleywag recently pointed out. But used properly, it's a very interesting reporting and publishing tool for breaking news. 
• Philly.com is one of several newspaper sites using a breaking news blog to quickly push stories onto the site. On a developing story, this can be a bit like reading wire-service updates and writethrus, which can be oddly entertaining as the story comes together, not to mention informative and newsy. In any event, it provides rapid updates to the site and keeps things fresh. It would be nice to have more than a simple list of headlines, but it's the right idea. (Oh, and hello, old Philly.com pals: Why is the breaking news blog not clearly labeled or featured on Philly.com's News page?) The Philadelphia Inquirer–part of Philly.com–also has its own Twitter-distributed news feed.
• Politico, on its new Politico44 offshoot that tracks the Obama administration, is publishing brief, Twitter-like dispatches at the top of the page in a space called, for some reason, The Whiteboard. Unfortunately, these news flashes don't seem to be archived anywhere, at least not obviously, so if you don't see them as they pass by, you miss them.

The concept of constantly streaming news is a real sea change for most, if not all newsrooms, accustomed as they were to publishing no story before its time, which invariably was whenever the evening deadline occurred. Now reporters are learning to push tidbits of news online quickly for a voracious, news-hungry audience segment–sometimes tweeting just a few words at a time. If legendary Washington Post Publisher Philip L. Graham's famous view of journalism as the "rough first draft of history" is still valid, then these are the notes for the first draft.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, though I know it discomfits a lot of print journalists to be filing news in real time. Wire services and broadcasters have done that for years, and all the usual concerns about accuracy and context and quality should still apply. But we're living in a 60/60/24/7 world now, and there are a lot of competitors–formal and informal–who are pushing news to readers as fast as it comes in. Newspaper Web sites have to learn to keep up with the pace of the news–not the slow, artificial cycles of print production.

Comments

[Chris M.]

No mention of the Tribune's popular breaking news page, which smartly combines assets from across the company and gives a unique and identifiable URL strong promotion on all Tribune outlets from TV & radio to online and in print?

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/blog/

The philly.com example is an also example of hiding the breaking news link on the home page. Tribune (and others) trumpets it.

[Danny Sanchez]

Mark, I agree completely that news sites should be focused on up-to-the-minute news, but I disagree with the sentiment that most news sites didn't embraced this several years ago.

Using Florida as an example, since that's where I've worked at various news sites, I never experienced a web operation that didn't put a priority on getting breaking news on its site. That may not have been true five years ago, but this mindset has been in place for at least the last three or more years. While the Orlando Sentinel (where I work) also just launched a Chicago Tribune-like Breaking News section, that doesn't mean our site wasn't providing continuous breaking news throughout the day. The St. Pete Times has had its This Just In blog --which covers overnight news-- for several years now (I worked there as well). In the Central Florida market, even smaller print publications such as the Leesburg Daily Commercial, Lakeland Ledger and Orlando Business Journal frequently post breaking news on their sites. All the local TV news sites post breaking news as well. The same holds true in the South Florida and Tampa Bay areas.

The only cases where breaking news on the web has not been a priority is with particularly small publications that probably don't have the resources nor revenue potential to do it, though this is quickly changing as powerful production tools have become open-source.

[Mark Potts]

Danny: Thanks for the comment. I agree that many large newspaper sites have dabbled in regularly updated news for years, but even at some of those sites there have been internal impediments to fully embracing it. And in any case, I think the advent of Twitter and news blogs are now allowing what is, in effect, streaming news. Rather than waiting for a story to get written, edited and posted, there's much more real-time publishing now.

[Danny Sanchez]

Mark: You're right; by no means have newspapers reached their full potential in providing breaking news delivered in interesting ways. Twitter is a great step. However, the value of Twitter I think goes far beyond providing breaking news. It can be a great tool in forming a relationship with readers. We've had some success with blog-specific Twitter accounts, such as our Moms at Work blog (http://twitter.com/momsatwork). Not to pick on the Trib again, but their ColonelTribune character at twitter.com/coloneltribune seems to be a hit too.

The biggest impediment I've witnessed at newspapers in regards to posting breaking news is the newspaper-first mentality where stories --often but not always exclusives-- get held too often for the print edition. That said, I think most newspaper sites have gotten pretty good at posting the obvious "breaking news," such as fires, crime, disasters and so on. Nevertheless, we should always strive to do more for our readers.