Breaking the News Cycle

There was a time when the daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute pace of my life was dictated by the news cycle. 

From the moment I woke up until I went to sleep (and often into dreamland), I wondered what the next cycle of stories would bring. It shaped what I did and where I went. It surprised, alarmed, and sometimes befuddled. Such is the job of a journalist.

It’s an odd term, the “news cycle,” in that it denotes a passage of time without specifying an exact duration. Instead, it is characterized by the frequency of news production and how swiftly one set of stories replaces another. 

In the age of newspaper dominance, the news cycle was reliably a daily occurrence (or maybe twice a day for cities with afternoon papers). When a news cycle began and when it ended was circumscribed by strict deadlines that had to account for the time it took to set, print, and deliver the physical newspapers. 

Radio and television collapsed the news cycle with real-time delivery. But still, news shows had regular time slots as part of larger broadcasting schedules. Exceptions were made for breaking news (a term that once actually meant something significant and rare but has since been devalued to mean anything CNN wants you to watch after the commercial break). 

When I started my journalism career at CBS News a quarter century ago, I quickly learned that each program in the network news division had its own internal news cycle. 

At “60 Minutes,” the news cycle could stretch for months. There were only three stories per weekly show and we took our time researching, shooting, and editing our pieces. On rare occasions something would happen that was so urgent we rushed a story to air in a matter of a few days — the war in Iraq and the tsunami in the Indian Ocean were a few of the examples I produced. These types of quick turn-around stories are called “crashes.” Some reporters loved them. Others loathed them. I tended to relish the urgency and importance. It required focus and stamina. The challenge was not only to get the story fast but to get it right. 

My next stop was “Sunday Morning” which, as the name suggests, has a news cycle conveniently measured in seven-day increments. It’s a wonderful program that tends to feature stories on art, history, and other cultural fare. The demands of the news cycle felt more distant in this environment. But not always. I was proud of how we rushed to New Orleans to cover Hurricane Katrina, for example. 

When I moved to the “CBS Evening News,” the news cycle shrank to a matter of hours. I woke up each morning and devoured the newspaper headlines. What had happened overnight? What were the stories we would need to put on the air when we went live at 6:30 p.m.? By 7 a.m., it felt like the clock was already ticking. There were many days I was already on my way to the airport before the sun had risen (I kept a small go bag packed at the ready). Other days, I would hit the phones tracking down sources. As the hours progressed, we kept an eye on cable news and online to see if a late-breaking event would upend our broadcast. The lineup of stories was always in flux. 

I worked for nearly a decade at CBS News, and there was a growing awareness that broadcast television news had entered its twilight. New technologies and audience habits had collapsed the news cycle. Cable news, news radio, and most importantly the Internet created the now-ubiquitous 24-hour news cycle. Fifty years earlier television news had challenged the supremacy of newspapers. Now it was the one under threat. 

In an online digital world, the whole notion of a deadline is obsolete. There are no barriers to publishing or consuming the news. All you need now is a phone and you are connected to the world instantaneously. Social media has now accelerated these trends to a ridiculous degree. Who needs to spend the time researching, reporting, and writing or filming a story when you can just send out a tweet and reach millions of people eager to engage. 

I left CBS News to join Dan Rather on his weekly cable news magazine program, “Dan Rather Reports.” It was a throwback to old fashioned television journalism. In-depth stories from around the globe. We all loved the work. But we also tried to embrace the future. Working with Dan to develop his Facebook and Twitter accounts, I could see the power and danger of what he liked to call the “nanosecond news cycle.” 

Our endlessly shrinking news cycle has implications far beyond the world of journalism. It moves the financial markets. And in Washington, politicians strive to cut through. There has long been a clamor to “win the news cycle” — to dominate what people (or at least the D.C. press corps) are talking about. 

Donald Trump was and remains a master of dominating news cycles. If polls and pundits are to be believed, Joe Biden distinctly is not. He’s an analog president in a digital world. He seems notably uninterested in engaging with whatever is dominating the news of the moment. Many, including many of his supporters, see this as a liability. But I have come to believe that it may be one of his greatest strengths. Does it really matter how many news cycles Biden “loses” in January if the country and the world end up in a better place by the November elections?

I sometimes reread social media posts Dan and I put up in the past. If I am being honest, I often cannot understand what we were talking about. We clearly were responding to something that was so dominant in the news cycle at the time that we didn’t have to spell it out. Everyone reading our post knew what we were talking about. But now, removed from that context, it is inscrutable. Certainly what was trending at 3:22 p.m. on a random Tuesday in May seemed important at the time. Now? Not so much. 

The thing about instantaneous news cycles is that they are instantaneously replaced by something else. And the bigger world trends, the ones that will be remembered in the history books, can be lost in the cacophony of our digital echo chambers. Speed supersedes context, nuance, and thought. Is ping-ponging through our cluttered news feeds really understanding the news, and the world?

Recently, I have tried to step away from my phone for my news consumption. It’s a hard habit to break, but I rarely go on social media sites anymore (Substack of course being an exception). I’ve embraced newspaper subscriptions and good old-fashioned websites. I get magazines in the mail. I’m trying to read more books, like the wonderful biography I am finishing about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. To be immersed in big ideas like the strategies and struggles of the civil rights movement instead of the claustrophobic inanity of social media-trending topics is bracingly refreshing. 

Sometimes I might miss out on a story everyone is talking about. Until they are talking about something else. And when I look at it that way, I don’t think I’m missing out on anything at all. If it is still important, I can read about it in tomorrow morning’s paper.