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I have a schizo theory and no better place to put it.
The average length of time an item spends in the news cycle has changed. What used to last for 2-3 weeks, maybe a month now lasts for months on end, and potentially a year plus. Society's reaction to Covid is the obvious material cause. By shutting down large amounts of human activity, governments prevented newsworthy things from happening. Covid remained the default news item throughout most of 2020, being punctuated only by the Floyd slaying, which took up most of the summer then yielded to the US elections before running to Covid for the next year. However, since the winding down of restrictions in 2022, this pattern has not ceased. The news cycle since then has been dominated by the self inflicted Cost of Living crisis and more recently we are seeing fallout from the latest episode of the Israel and Palestine show, which took place back in October.
Why is this? My schizo theory is the that there are two contributing factors. First is that increased internet use during the lockdowns gave news outlets much needed traffic and analytics data to identify how people use their site and what they most interact with. Where news items might have been frontpage and then accessible under the relevant section of the site (ie, health, entertainment, economy, etc) now has been moved into its own standalone section accessible from anywhere on the site. Second is that habbits have been solidifed amongst the population where they now check the news with a much, much greater frequency than they used to, but also "follow" stories of a particular narrative over a long period of time.
I have no idea how you'd go about testing any of this.
You'd have to create an artificial metric for the importance of a news item, then measure for how many weeks it was front page news in a basket of prominent newspapers, then how long it was a prominent feature item, and how long until it disappeared entirely. How long did the Ukraine war stay on the front page every day in the WSJ and NYT and LA Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, vs how long did the Yugoslav wars stay on the front page. Various Israeli-Palestinian crises probably provide a relatively 1:1 comparison, as would mass shootings, or sex scandals.
But I suspect you wouldn't see stories stick around all that much longer. Rather, I think this perception might be the result of the multiplicity of content outlets that can be labeled "news" today. There's a long tail of websites putting out content every day, posting something, trying to get views. As a result there are always going to be dead-enders pursuing stories that have long dropped out of the mainstream news outlets.
There's also fewer actual reporters, fewer gumshoes knocking on doors and calling people on the phone and going to public meetings and digging into old files chasing actual stories. From the Times on down but especially below, newsrooms have died. Reporting new stories requires actual reporting, commenting on and remixing and reiterating old stories doesn't.
So you have content clickbait farms like Slate and Jezebel and TheAmericanConservative and a hundred websites that are even lower tier. And they've all got a dozen or more writers, and one of them might just have a hobby horse that he keeps putting out a shitty little article about every week or so, and that's a constant drumbeat of stuff about something everyone else has given up on.
So take a current Current Thing. The Kendrick Lamar vs Drake Rap Beef, and the associated accusations that Drake is a creep/pedo. Right now it's popular and fun, everyone is talking about it, the Dodgers are playing Not Like Us during batting practice, somebody shot at Drake's house, but two weeks from now it'll probably be out of the news. But you might have one writer who stays on the Drake is a Freaky Ass Nigga' beat, and just from sheer multiplicity of writers you can keep posting the same story over and over again, and it might feel like it stays "in the news" longer.
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I think there's some conflation of the fact that we're living through a geopolitical inflection point when lots of important events worth discussing are happening e.g. the Ukraine War, US withdrawal from the Middle East, the rise of China, etc. and the fact that rising polarization in the West means that what would otherwise be individual clickbait stories can be easily slotted into long-running culture war narratives that make us feel like we have been discussing the same thing forever e.g. anything to do with Trump or woke ideology in schools.
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Might be the first time I’m hearing news stories described as longer. We had to keep our
Floyd containmentbare links thread for months!I’m skeptical that article delivery has changed much, at least in the mainstream publishers. The struggle to hold on to newspaper models continues, I guess.
I remember that the bare links thread was primarily used as a way to link to random things and to have people make comments on them that wouldn't be tolerated in any other thread.
It being introduced when it did told me a lot about our society.
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Articles getting longer is a long term thing; read old newspapers from 100 years ago and a lot of news stories for smaller things were the length of tweets today, just very small box paragraphs of text.
I just wish modern day news sources would reintroduce the old TLDR-style series of cascading headlines.
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For what it’s worth, I thought you were going to say that news cycles have shortened.
I feel like both things have happened; some things that might warrant longer-term discussion are out of the news quick, other things are dragged out into a narrative.
Remember the Ground Zero mosque? Fox News and Jon Stewart milked that non-story for months. That discourse would last about 8 hours in 2024.
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My theory is that at any one time, there's one "primary" international news topic which dominates the Anglosphere discourse for months or years at a time. This topic is sometimes coupled with a "local" topic which only dominates the discourse in specific Anglosphere nations. In addition to the primary and local topic du jour, there are smaller secondary topics which take up a great number of column inches for a few weeks, but rarely longer than a fiscal quarter, and never threatening the status of the "primary" topic.
A history of international "current things" in Ireland:
A history of "local" topics which dominated the Irish discourse almost as much as the dominant topic du jour, but only locally (with some maybe getting a few write-ups in British outlets):
There was a period of several years where you never saw "Iran" in the news without it being followed by "-Contra."
There's one local example that sticks in my mind, even after all these years. Back in 1982, there was a rabies epidemic. For months, almost every day on the front page of the Fairfax Journal, there were stories about rabid animals (it was almost always raccoons for some reason) being found and euthanized.
Then a while later I realized I wasn't seeing those anymore.
But there was never any announcement of an end to the epidemic. For all I know, it might still be going on!
https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/usa/surveillance/wild_animals.html
It is! It got much worse, and now it's back down to 1982 levels.
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From my time in Ireland I'd add Savita Halappanavar's death and the ban on turf cutting.
Such an obvious one, don't know how I forgot it.
Was the Jedward coverage unique out of recent eurovision coverage?
I'm not sure if I understand the question.
The Jedward years overlapped with my time in Ireland. It seemed like they were everywhere and girls would turn up to see them at the mall or a supermarket.
Bambie Thug get similar coverage and treatment?
Certainly Bambie Thug is nowhere near as omnipresent in the popular imagination as Jedward were at their peak. I would put "the celebrity everyone is currently talking about" in a very different category to "the political topic everyone is currently talking about", though.
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COVID was a big deal, so were the Floyd riots, so is inflation. The GFC was also a big deal and had correspondingly large media coverage. 9/11 and the global war on terror were likewise.
It's just that more important things are happening now than in the 2010s.
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