The Breaking News Mentality and Depth

The Breaking News Mentality and Depth:

For untold centuries, the newspaper broke the news. They were the first on-call, the first to really research the story. As late as the 1970s, Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post proved the paper’s relevance in the age of television.

Although it’s hard to change tactics from an industry that still cannot grasp that it might be okay to change the size of the paper, newspapers no longer break the stories. For expected, visual events, television breaks the story, for other events, news Web sites – many of them owned and operated by traditional news media – break the stories before the print is on the streets.

I see this myself with The Daily Texan, where I worked the past six months as associate editor. The Daily Texan operates a website at www.dailytexanonline.com, and the website updates at around 1:30 am, before the next day’s paper is delivered to the ubiquitous orange Daily Texan news boxes. Since all the stories are available first, and I can access them by going to the website or accessing the RSS feed, I usually end up reading the stories printed first. I even got into a little bit of trouble – the editor, Ben Heath, was about to chastise me for writing about a letter to the editor in my blog before it was printed. It was true, I was up at 3:00 am that night, and decided to respond to it, but I only knew about the letter because the paper had already published it. Once I explained this, the editor was more understanding but still a bit nonplussed.

It’s clear these days that the New York Times Online can publish before the New York Times, Statesman.com can publish before the Austin American-Statesman, and blogs can often publish faster than anyone. There is just too much of a lag-time between when a story is written and when the paper literally threads through the machine and is delivered in order to break the news.

Yet, newspapers are still set up for breaking news – the inverted pyramid style, specifically is designed to catch a person up on the most basic and most important facts at the beginning of the story. But often, a person who has already read a story online will look at a newspaper and, seeing in the lead the first few facts — that he already knows — he will not likely read the rest of the article, even if the article contains more in-depth information than he has received online. (This is especially true if putting most of the article beyond a fold obscures the size of the text.)

Newspapers should move towards a more “newsmagazine” style of writing, (which should be very easy now that newsmagazines have moved to a “pop magazine” style of writing.) They should include context, and most importantly, history.

The people just picking up the news, whether because they’re young and reaching for a newspaper for the first time, or because they’ve been civically disengaged and seek to reengage themselves, will often not find the context in news stories.

For example, I’m trying to study New Zealand politics by reading the two major newspapers, the Dominion-Post of Wellington, and the New Zealand Herald of Auckland. Right now, the top story is about an MP named John Tamihere, and whether he may, or may not, have left some cats to starve.

Reading the article gave me no idea who the hell John Tamihere was, why his cats were important, and what impact this has on New Zealand politics. Reading more into the whole cats thing requires quite a bit of research from other places – indeed, it would be very tempting for me, or any other “alien observer” to stop the research altogether. After all, on the surface, it’s about cats.

Newspapers not only have to keep in mind that it’s less important for them to be fast than it is to be thorough, but that they also need to adopt a mandate that every issue of the paper is someone’s first issue of the paper. (Because most assuredly, the way things are going, every issue is somebody’s last.)

Newspaper companies can certainly remain in the “breaking news” business, but their best bet is to do so on their Web sites. Rather than having the Web site be an adjunct to the newspaper, perhaps businesses need to think very hard about developing the newspaper as an adjunct to the website.