Epilogue: Timing the study of news temporality

Foregrounding the temporal in a digital news environment

Central to any discussion of contemporary news and time are the expectations that come with digital platforms. At the core of the current news environment, the digital plays a key role in driving assumptions about how the news is made and experienced. Expectations of unprecedented speed – and lamentations of its absence – have been instrumental in this regard, buttressed in large part by a repair to speed in journalists’ own discussions of what they do. As a report issued by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism noted, five of the six editors surveyed said speed or immediacy was the aspect of social media that most helped them process the news (Alejandro, 2010).

Reflected in a recurrent nod to timeliness, simultaneity, liveness, instantaneity, acceleration, and immediacy, the centrality of speed drives the notion that faster news is tantamount to better news. An insistence on the timeliness of news relay has made quick reporting a mark of good journalism. As Brugger and Bodker note in their article in this issue, ‘the broad narrative is often of a steady march towards almost instant news from almost anywhere’. Although this assumption is at times true, its rhetorical force has become more steadfast than its occurrence on the ground. It builds on a centuries-old alignment between the promise of ever-faster technologies and the newsmaking that follows their tenets. When that alignment is set aside, however, conflicting observations surface involving the degree to which quick and agile delivery diminishes and simplifies the news, often while sacrificing accuracy, intensifying information overload, and muddying the potential for productive deliberation.

Most general discussions of the news have tended to be less interested in journalism’s temporal dimensions than in the fact that time can be used discursively to bolster a certain understanding of journalism. They have thereby tended to bury the problems associated with speed’s celebration or lamentations of its absence. The Newseum, for instance, features an online educational module, titled ‘The Speed of News’ (2016), that distinguishes different channels of information relay by their speeds and instructs students to ‘reflect on how different forms of communication – and their corresponding speeds – can shape our understanding of the world around us’. The repair to speed becomes particularly marked in the digital moment, where, as Usher notes, all news media need to adjust to the same deadline. When combined with the dynamic accommodation of witnesses, bystanders, and citizen journalists making the news simultaneously to it being consumed, what Sheller (2015: 24) called the ‘now-ness of news’ plays to a notion of speed that by and large overwhelms other aspects of temporality. Even the turn to speed’s inverse – slowness – suffers from aspects of similar unidimensional thinking. The idea of ‘slow journalism’ (Le Mausurier, 2016), for instance, is predicated on the recognition of a more lethargic pacing as the most useful temporal impulse for the current moment.

It is curious that such a unidimensional understanding of speed, either affirmative or skeptical, persists, for even a brief look backwards reminds us of the folly in adopting it. History abounds with data that temper the quality and relevance of largely technologically driven axioms about the news that align improvement automatically with quickness and disruption with its absence. The arrival and development of broadcasting, for example, at first refuted, confirmed, and then refuted again the prevailing wisdom that journalism’s technological parade could produce a sequence of ever-better kinds of news engagement. Instead, the doubt and skepticism that linger even today about the quality of TV news remind us powerfully of the complications that arise from embracing agility as if it were occurring on its own. Faster is not necessarily better.

Why does the centrality of speed prevail in light of data that qualify and at times disprove its value? Much has to do with the widespread acceptance of notions of time as a blank slate. Presumed to unfold according to one of two main philosophical positions sketched over a century ago – what McTaggart (1908) called the ‘a-theory of time’ (the presentist approach to time as a series of sequential temporal positions moving from past to present to future) versus the ‘b-theory of time’ (the eternalist approach to time as tenseless and reality unchanging) – temporality is thought to take shape more in response to complex settings than as a result of other kinds of interactions. But time is not only a blank slate. As Kosellek (2004) reminds us, the more ‘a particular time is experienced as a new temporality, [e.g.] as ‘modernity’, the more that demands made of the future increase. Special attention is therefore devoted to [the] present’ (p. 3). Once time is seen as more than just a blank slate, it can invite different kinds of exchange that proceed more or less independently of circumstances on the ground.

Multiple aspects of news temporality complicate the tendency to position speed as a stand-in for time. Tempo, duration, simultaneity, repetition, delay, sequencing, timing, continuity, context, pause, and hesitation regularly detour the inevitability of either a simple build-up to quickness or the sense of deflation at times associated with its absence. Such impulses suggest that while digital news might be faster, more instantaneous, immediate or live – none of which are the same and none of which exits in any kind of uniform way across digital platforms – expectations of speed are tempered by conditions that undermine the assumption of one kind of shared temporal experience. Craig (2016), for instance, notes how news temporality necessarily matches itself to the temporalities of the institutions covered by the news, with timeliness ‘linked to the procedures and operations of other institutional fields’ (p. 467). Even dimensions having little to do with speed – as in Phillips’ (2012) discussion of ‘sociability’ – help undercut the notion that faster (or slower) news somehow works in splendid isolation.

Understanding temporal news practices in ways that go beyond speed is thus essential. Scholarship already orients in this direction. Wildholm’s (2015) discussion of the tireless pace of digital updating underscores the simultaneous embodiment of fast and slow in the same news content. The fruitful notion of ‘accumulated contemporaneity’ (Bodker, 2016) – the paradoxical systematic combination of chronicling and archiving, or looking sideways and backwards, by which the meaning of a news event is progressively crafted – challenges simple assumptions of speed in discussions of news temporality. And the ability to ferret out more temporal moments than has been typically articulated – a distinction between the ‘immediate-past’ and ‘recent past’, for instance (Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger, 2015) – speaks to the need to problematize the spaces separating fast from slow. The promise embodied in offsetting the prevalent temporal thinness of discussions is significant, for it renders the digital environment surprisingly representative of much larger patterned relationships with time, relationships that can be found in everyday life and that supersede or diminish the impact of mediated platforms of any kind. Who among us experiences time only in conjunction with speed or its inverse? Journalism is no exception.

The articles collected here begin with that promise. They demonstrate that current news temporality is more differentiated, nuanced, and active than has been assumed, and they challenge the default background status of a blank slate that temporality has been given in much journalism scholarship. They also flip the centrality of speed onto its side in discussions of temporality, showing that as classic as either/or positions on temporality might be in the philosophy of time, they do not begin to unpack the temporal practices of today’s complex institutional settings.

It is not surprising that journalism could be central to a more nuanced contemplation of time. It constitutes a rich environment for demonstrating that the blank slate of temporality changes by context, by what gets charted onto it and by who does the charting, and its temporality exists both on the high ground of temporal practice as well as on its messy, porous underside. In that light it offers an opportunity to push past the residual dichotomy of fast and slow. Charting instead time’s shifting, dynamic nature offers productive contours for thinking differently about how and under which conditions temporality might constitute not a background but a foreground through which to contemplate the news.

Temporality and news production

One of the primary demonstrations of the digital environment’s complex temporal impact on journalism can be found in its presence in news production. Often, conflicts over how journalism is produced draw from temporal expectations that are by definition awry, for ‘organizational efficiency denotes lesser time for journalists to do their work and professional efficiency necessitates more relaxed deadlines to ensure quality’ (Reich and Godler, 2014: 609). Caught in the quandary of competing temporal expectations, journalists rhetorically privilege the argument that they can do both but pragmatically often end up turning relaxed deadlines into urgent ones.

Contrary to suppositions prevalent in much of journalism itself, the digital environment makes clear that journalists no longer have a monopoly over time – associated with what Schlesinger (1977) famously called journalism’s ‘time machine’ – even though time drives much of what they do. Whether via the nurturing of a notion of news-as-process, by which journalists are able to anticipate the changes that are emblems of the digital era, as Barnhurst and Nightingale show in this issue, or a mode of ‘relational authority’ that tweaks general storytelling authority to that required by the speed of incremental updating, as Usher attests, the range of temporal activity that regularly shapes newsmaking is broad, unfolding and internally variable.

To be sure, journalism’s reliance on multiple temporalities is not a new idea: consider Schudson’s (1986) discussion of the ‘continuous present’ in the news, Zelizer’s (1993) idea of journalism’s ‘double time’ or Barnhurst’s (2011) contention that past and future time are always interwoven in journalism’s record of the present. But digital technology complicates the blank slate of temporality in new ways. For instance, Sonnevend considers the intricate temporal practices – creating substitute events as a way of generating continuity – that journalists develop in response to events without obvious closure, while Brugger and Bodker explore the overlapping levels of the webpage, showing that the move from uncoordinated temporal action to negotiated temporality requires the perfect storm of circumstances to help it along.

This is all part of what Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger usefully call temporal affordances, which exemplify how different technologies – in their case, online and print – facilitate different temporal contours that make their way into news narrative. The multi-dimensional picture they draw, which builds upon earlier studies (Neiger and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2016; Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger, 2015), provides evidence that renders partial even the most basic assumptions connected to temporality. How does one know temporality when one sees it? Is it immediacy, liveness, preparation time, transience, fixation in time or extended retrievability? Looking beyond newsmaking toward longstanding temporal orientations in the culture at large, their discussion suggests both that temporal affordances are more intact than expected and that forcing time beyond its most obvious contours in newsmaking is necessary for its understanding.

However, as suggested by the articles here, multiple questions remain. News practices require a more rigorous analysis of how multiple simultaneous temporal strategies take shape. This is made clear across different circumstances: Keightley and Downey’s useful reminder that ‘temporal experience is produced in the ways in which different temporalities rub up against each other’; Usher’s unpacking of how the basic temporal orientation toward immediacy necessarily involves that of other news outlets and journalists, audiences, and economic interests; and Brugger and Bodker’s notion of temporality as constituted by relations between websites and their users. What becomes of this mix of different temporalities in news production? In particular, what happens when time is itself either purposefully stretched out – more long-form than event-driven, driven as much by context as by time (Fink and Schudson, 2014) or strategically cut short – evident in the coverage of the missing Malaysian airplane, as discussed by Sonnevend? What happens, as Usher notes, when journalists confront real-time feedback from analytics firms even though production time remains slower? Suggesting that journalists’ experience of time in newsmaking engages with temporality from a variety of positions, these questions call for a broadening of scholarly notions of time beyond those embraced most easily by journalists and by many journalism scholars in order to better approximate the temporal practices of everyday life.

Temporality and news consumption

A second temporal expectation relevant to journalism has to do with the public’s experience of news. Speed here again rears its head. Consumption of the news is by and large assumed to be brief, sporadic, and fickle, seen in large part as a response to the rapidity of news delivery. Although time spent reading newspapers has been steadily decreasing in places as wide-ranging as the United States, United Kingdom, Norway, and Australia, evidence points to an upswing in time spent with long-form journalism in certain digital forms, such as mobile phones.

Keightley and Downey most directly probe the temporal character of news consumption, offering a critical reminder that the time beyond journalism needs to count when thinking about news temporality. Arguing for the interplay between mediated and socially constructed time in news consumption, they demonstrate a natural embrace of multiple temporalities in everyday experience. Focusing on news users and their generation of what they call ‘zones of intermediacy’, they argue against the idea that the digital environment depends primarily on speed and instead draw out the various constellations of time in which individuals connect with social, cultural, historical, and technological temporalities.

The idea of multiple temporalities in itself is not novel – Edward T Hall’s (1959) classic distinction between monochronic and polychronic time comes to mind – but it is significant in this discussion because it offers a reminder that the time associated with the consumption of digital technology can and does take shape in non-temporal ways. This allows digital news to do the opposite of what is expected – it delivers ‘other times’, in Keightley and Downey’s phrase, that then become proximate and can be variably acted upon: individuals can linger over a news story, develop multiple cross-overs between individual and group, craft together private and public time, and then repeat the process.

The concern with audience engagement in the news also surfaces in Sonnevend’s discussion of media events, where in addressing the backdrop status of time in Dayan and Katz’ (1992) book Media Events, she reclassifies them from being mere temporal interruptions to playing a role in the communities that reconstitute them. Drawing upon Wagner-Pacifici’s (2010) insistence on the restlessness and continued oscillation of events, Sonnevend demonstrates how it is via an event’s movement across time (as well as space) that it takes on useful parameters related to community and solidarity.

Because multiple temporalities are at issue in news consumption, it makes sense that even those articles directly concerned with the temporality of news production venture easily into the lap of the audience. Usher’s discussion of continuous online updating and real-time traffic numbers offers the wry view that ‘every incremental news update presents a new quantifiable measure of whether audiences actually care’. The affordances of time in news production identified by Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger raise productive pathways for thinking about news consumption too: what if the urge to engage with the news were primarily driven by a ‘fixation in time’ – that is, a need to make one’s own present-ness thicker and more multi-dimensional? Conversely, what if so-called ‘new junkies’ operated largely in the haze of ‘preparation time’, propelled by their own anxieties about what is next on the horizon? Here come to mind the practices in which audiences ritualistically engage in preparing to collectively watch media events like sports contests or the weddings and funerals of public figures (Dayan and Katz, 1992): audience behavior demonstrates its own unusual accommodations – the rearrangement of furniture, preparation of special food, verbal negotiation of collective viewing practices (Zelizer, 1991) – which further exemplify the mix of temporalities in experiencing the news. The richness of such activity deserves more consideration than it has been given to date.

Temporality and journalism’s shelf-life

A third uneven temporal expectation has to do with professional and academic suspicions about journalism’s shelf-life and the widely asserted notion that journalism is dying. The so-called ‘end of news’ – often but not always confused with the presumed ‘end of newspapers’ – does service to the idea that journalism as it exists today is on the verge of extinction. Although the idea itself is debatable (Zelizer, 2015), the uncertainty it raises is profound. John Dewey (1929) noted long ago that the anchoring of any enterprise requires unifying the ‘settled and the unsettled, the stable and the hazardous’ (p. 85). The study of journalism, and its own legitimation, thus rests on a certain solidification of its circulating knowledge.

The anchoring referenced by Dewey necessarily involves acts of codification that depend in large part on time. And yet longstanding notions of journalism itself – and the core of its study – rely on the present, notably evident in the pre-digital age. As Patterson (1998) observed nearly two decades ago, ‘the news is deliberately short-sighted, is rooted in novelty rather than precision, and focuses on fastbreaking events rather than enduring issues’ (p. 155).

For journalism’s study, a rhetorical insistence on the present makes sense. Repairing to the here-and-now is what distinguishes journalism from other modes of public engagement. Because the present is its constitutive feature, nodding to it and the ability to hinge discussions on it are pragmatically useful. In Andrew Abbott’s (2001) view, ‘knowledge becomes great only when it has internal consistency’ (p. 121). Thus, maintaining a focus on a simple temporality in the news – that is, journalism as a primarily or even solely present-oriented enterprise – helps clarify and legitimate its identity and consolidate the authority of its scholarly discussion. This means that the embrace of a simple notion of temporality, often reduced to considerations of speed or its absence, has strategic value not only for journalists themselves but also for scholars invested in upholding journalism’s singularity.

But the rhetorical insistence on the present has real ramifications, as these articles demonstrate. To an extent, simplistic notions of news temporality have been the case for about as long as scholars have studied the news. They draw from the fact that journalism in many scholarly discussions is still seen to serve a master other than itself – the public, ideals associated with civic engagement, democratic governments or nation-states – and thus the notions of time associated with it need to reflect that role. Benedict Anderson’s (1983) much-revered consideration of imagined communities is emblematic in this regard, simultaneously underscoring journalism’s regularization of time while limiting it to notions of simultaneity that fit his theory of emergent collectivity. Obscured here is the fact that the simplistic notions of time necessary to privilege journalism’s role in fostering collectivity diminish attention to the time-based practices and values that might not serve such an aim.

When applied to scholars themselves, these circumstances raise the intriguing question of whether the insistence on the present is a reactive response to a growing recognition of journalism’s presumably depleted future. Not only does the simplistic scholarly embrace of time thin out the capacity to embrace journalism as an enterprise that regularly and systematically employs a rich and complex engagement with temporal positions of many kinds, but it helps keep the study of journalism in a temporally frozen cocoon that reflects a prosaic fragment of how journalism works (Zelizer, 2016). Because that cocoon is internally consonant with larger assumptions of what journalism is for, its value is repeatedly underscored and reified as a focal point for inquiry. Keeping the discussion alive of a present-oriented journalistic endeavor, then, might act as a protective barrier to uncertainty over what is yet to come. Lost are the complexities that by necessity characterize the accommodation of time in the news.

Such complexities have been both magnified and diminished across existing scholarly interventions in the study of time. They are magnified by the efforts of those scholars, like the individuals represented in this issue, which actively probe temporality’s shifting and nuanced nature. Paradoxically, as technology seems to hasten time and accord it ever-growing centrality, an increasing number of scholars have responded by contemplating the internal complexities that characterize time’s perusal in journalism. And much like historical inquiry slows down the closer it comes to the present, their inquiry too has usefully decelerated as they pose careful questions about what changes and remains the same in understandings of news temporality.

But complexities are also diminished because scholarly interventions may be altering the very contours of time. The idea of time has been systematically studied through the imposition of analytical units, descriptors, and conceptual boundaries. None of these necessarily captures how time itself works, and they may indeed be charting the parameters of what is made visible in scholarship. Adam’s (1995) distinction between ‘non-temporal time’, which can be measured, and ‘temporal time’, which cannot, raises the question of whether time can ever be sufficiently understood on its own terms. Would news temporality look the same without the analytical tools being introduced and favored for its analysis?

It is worth noting too the role played by the recurrent element of surprise in studies of time and journalism. These articles show that news temporality is far less intuitive and less predictable than assumed, displaying one of the most characteristic responses in research on time: recognition of its counterintuitive nature. Showing that much of what surfaces about news temporality seems not to fit expectations and forces scholars to reconfigure what they had expected to find, the articles in this issue register intellectual surprise, for instance, around the notion that digital media’s immediacy could allow for prolonged public engagement, as Keightley and Downey show, or the idea that disruptive media events are transformed into continuities, as Sonnevend claims. Examples like these raise the question of why we continue to be surprised by temporality. Does temporality not receive enough attention from news scholars because existing assumptions about time themselves need refinement? Do the parallel assumptions invoked about temporality make different enterprises more similar than they need be? Put temporally, there may be need to start at the very beginning of existing interventions with time to understand where it takes scholars on their intellectual journeys. That in turn might force a reconsideration of the depletion associated with journalism’s future and the effect it has today on journalism scholarship.

Barnhurst and Nightingale offer a useful prism through which to consider the timing of journalism’s study of temporality: ‘The work of journalism’, they write, ‘builds something larger than the sum of the individual works, since the aim is realizing an ideal that stands forever’. As Kosellek (2004) noted, temporality results from the structure in which lived events occur. This may be the key to complicating the engagement of journalism scholars with temporality, in that temporal orientations do not exist in and among scholars of journalism alone.

On timing the study of news temporality

This discussion of news and its temporality suggests that it is time to more fully study news temporality as a foreground for understanding the news. Three interconnected – and problematic – truisms about time in journalism have been at issue here: that the production of news strives for technologically dependent speed and immediacy, that the news can at best foster short-lived audience engagement, and that journalism and its scholarship are the woeful recipient of a bereft future. Given such sentiments, one can easily understand the lack of belief in the news and the resonant notion that it is in crisis.

But these ideas – which stem from an orientation toward the present in news production, an insufficient address to the temporality of news consumption and a sense of reactivity to the temporal depletion associated with journalism’s future – all demonstrate that the ‘there’ in news is undeniably grounded in time. In discussing the temporal structure of modern enterprises, Kosellek (2004) wrote that ‘the lesser the experience, the greater the expectation’ (p. 274). If indeed there exists an asymmetry between experience and expectation in the news, then the thinness of journalism’s temporal dimensions can be seen as a discursive pacifier, shaping the aspirations connected to a still-new digital environment and allaying anxieties about where that environment will take journalism.

But expectations on some level have come to signify too much about the viability of news, and they embody attempts to insert certainty into journalism’s much-debated future. With history ‘only able to recognize what continually changes, and what is new’ (Kosellek (2004: 298), this may be the best we can hope for. But with that rejoinder in mind, there still remains a critical need to foster a more ongoing engagement with the times and temporal practices that constitute the news.