The Era of Slow News

It’s com­mon knowl­edge that since the advent of 24-hour news net­works, the cycle of news has sped up con­sid­er­ably. With the rise of the Inter­net, it’s got­ten even faster. In this world of up-to-the-nanosecond news, we’ve learned, facts and con­text are thrown to the wind as our infor­ma­tion train wreck speeds down the tracks.

Right?

Let’s play devil’s advocate.

My argu­ment: The Inter­net is slow­ing the news cycle down. Way down. It’s so slow, it’s turn­ing the clock backwards.

To make this point, I’m going to turn the clock back myself, to rehash some very famil­iar sto­ries (pdf) with what I hope might be an unfa­mil­iar take.

Blogs began to reg­is­ter in the minds of many peo­ple around late Decem­ber of 2002, weeks after then-Senate Major­ity Leader Trent Lott made some innocu­ous com­ment about Strom Thur­mond at his birth­day party. The day after Lott made the remark, some fel­low named Josh Mar­shall men­tioned it on his Weblog thingie.

The main­stream news media barely noticed the com­ment, and pressed ahead with other news. At least one reporter, Ed O’Keefe, thought he might have sniffed some­thing there, but his col­leagues were unmoved. And by the time he’d gath­ered any string on the poten­tial story, at least a day had already passed and the issue was effec­tively dead. “You’re deal­ing with the news cycle,” he said. “Twenty-four hours later, that’s old news.”

But for Josh Mar­shall and a gath­er­ing crowd of other blog­gers, the news cycle had not moved on. It had stayed stock still, lodged stub­bornly on those remarks of Trent Lott from Decem­ber 5, 2002.

And on Decem­ber 9th, Mar­shall made a jour­nal­is­tic move that would have appalled any acolyte of the tra­di­tional news cycle: He started mov­ing into the past. That day, one of his blog items was a reprinted quote from a 1984 interview.

Tra­di­tional news orgs had caught the whiff of some­thing hap­pen­ing by that point, and began mov­ing the story the only way they knew how, by report­ing it for­ward. But by that point, the only part of the story that was not “old news” was the fact that peo­ple (mostly online com­men­ta­tors at that point) were talk­ing about it. So the tra­di­tional reporters started harp­ing on that fact. Even this atten­tion started online, in Howie Kurtz’s Media Notes col­umn for The Wash­ing­ton Post.

For the most part, the tra­di­tional media’s sto­ries stayed focused on the drum­beat of what was hap­pen­ing each day: Lott apol­o­gized, so-and-so decried his remarks, he apol­o­gized again, etc.

But in the blo­gos­phere, the story kept mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther back in time, back through Trent Lott’s life, through to the Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of 1948, and beyond. Blog­gers kept track of the day-to-day events, but to them, the news was that Lott’s com­ment might have reflected a pat­tern of seg­re­ga­tion­ist think­ing that showed through many of his pub­lic com­ments. And on this news front, they scooped the major orga­ni­za­tions day after day.

Uncon­sciously, they were estab­lish­ing a new model of news judg­ment that I think is still hold­ing true for online newsers today:

Tra­di­tional jour­nal­ists report sto­ries for­ward. Blog­gers can report them backwards.

Of course, almost every news blog­ger con­sid­ers it fun­da­men­tal to keep read­ers apprised of daily sto­ries from the tra­di­tional media. And many blog­gers fol­low tra­di­tional media’s lead, not­ing only the newest events in a story. But broadly, as sto­ries take on mass inter­est, blog­gers slow the story down, mov­ing flu­idly between past events and present ones as they scru­ti­nize a story from every angle.

Right now, a befud­dled press tries to advance the Valerie Plame / Karl Rove story by pump­ing out arti­cle after arti­cle on the seem­ingly nev­erend­ing lack of new infor­ma­tion. Blog­gers go com­fort­ably back and forth in time, keep­ing one eye on the trickle of news being rooted out in the case and one eye scan­ning the archives, restat­ing and refram­ing facts, comb­ing for any old detail that might be newly relevant.

And if there’s not any press inter­est in a story? Blog­gers, of course, stay put until folks start pay­ing atten­tion. Valerie Plame, I need not remind you, got stuck in the craw of one Josh Mar­shall well after most jour­nal­ists had for­got­ten who she was.

The new news judgment

But you’re not say­ing any­thing new, you might say. We all know blogs have been suc­cess­ful at breath­ing life into some under­re­ported sto­ries. Then why do we keep repeat­ing these canards about “The age of the Inter­net and the 24-hour news cycle”?

If you’re still talk­ing about the “24-hour news cycle,” you’re miss­ing my point. The Inter­net isn’t (just) quick­en­ing the pace of news to a second-by-second sched­ule. It’s enlarg­ing the scope of what con­sti­tutes news to a mat­ter of years.

Today, if we’re not first on the scene with cov­er­age of a late-breaking event, we’re almost as likely to seize the story — and our read­ers’ atten­tions — by report­ing back in time as by report­ing for­ward. When news breaks, it’s now worth con­sid­er­ing whether a reporter’s time is best spent call­ing the usual sus­pects for pre­dictable quotes, or if a trip through the archives might not be bet­ter. And when news oozes, slow­ing down and reex­am­in­ing our old sto­ries with a fine-tooth comb might yield a hot break­ing scoop. If not, at the very least, open up those archives online and let your read­ers play around in them.

There’s lots more to be said here about draw­ing in new audi­ences by groom­ing and reshap­ing older cov­er­age. About draw­ing atten­tion to under­re­ported sto­ries by shep­herd­ing them until a related story stokes the audience’s inter­est. And mostly, some­thing about the race not going to the swift.