The 24/7 News Cycle: The new normal, for better or worse

The 24/7 news cycle is a dou­ble-edged sword. When wield­ed prop­er­ly, there is no stronger weapon in the fight against igno­rance and mis­un­der­stand­ing. When wield­ed care­less­ly, it fos­ters igno­rance and mis­un­der­stand­ing. But despite its faults, the 24/7 news cycle isn’t going any­where. Our only path for­ward is to study it, mas­ter it and, if pos­si­ble, man­age it to the best of our ability.

The rea­son I don’t mind the 24/7 news cycle is that I’ve come up with strate­gies to keep it from get­ting out of con­trol, some­thing that every­one has to do to nav­i­gate the shift­ing news landscape.

One of those strate­gies is pick­ing my news sources with care. I put more trust in estab­lished news orga­ni­za­tions like the New York Times and Boston Globe. I gath­er news from cred­i­ble, ver­i­fied jour­nal­ists on Twit­ter, and I’ve devel­oped a dai­ly rou­tine of check­ing in with those sources via book­marks and Twit­ter lists. That sys­tem has­n’t let me down yet.

The imme­di­ate, con­stant nature of the inter­net is also con­ducive to the way I con­sume news. I have trou­ble stick­ing with a big block of text for more than 15 min­utes. Twit­ter and oth­er quick hit­ting, “fire­work shell” news bursts give me the bare-bone facts. If those facts are inter­est­ing and I want to dig deep­er, the New York Times is just a click away, offer­ing in-depth sto­ries and analy­sis from top-flight journalists.

There is the dan­ger that con­sumers won’t take that next step, and instead rely sole­ly on the quick hit­ting bursts that Bri­an Stel­ter referred to in his sto­ry. But is that the news cycle’s fault, or our own?

I don’t think pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists will have to do very much to main­tain their stan­dards in this new envi­ron­ment. Jour­nal­is­m’s codes of eth­i­cal con­duct and pro­fes­sion­al pro­to­cols are capa­ble of sur­viv­ing in the 24/7 news cycle. They will need to be adapt­ed and tweaked as new issues arise, but the bedrock empha­sis on truth, accu­ra­cy and sto­ry­telling will remain the same.

The grow­ing empha­sis on speed – some­times at the cost of accu­ra­cy, as Math­ew Ingram writes in “Twit­ter and the incred­i­ble shrink­ing news cycle” – is an impor­tant thing to keep an eye on, how­ev­er. It does­n’t both­er me very much if a cor­rec­tion is issued after the fact, but the issue of speed is one that we still don’t have an answer to, and it does have the poten­tial to be a big prob­lem. For exam­ple, we still haven’t for­got­ten Red­dit’s infa­mous attempt to pin down the Boston Marathon bomber last year.

Regard­less of its per­ils, to look at the 24/7 news cycle as over­whelm­ing or frus­trat­ing is to look at the glass half emp­ty. I don’t feel over­whelmed. I feel lucky to have so much infor­ma­tion at my imme­di­ate dis­pos­al, so many dif­fer­ing opin­ions and per­spec­tives to sort through.

The way I see it, the 24/7 news cycle is the new nor­mal. There’s no point in fight­ing it.