Breaking news production processes in US metropolitan newspapers: Immediacy and journalistic authority

Immediacy in journalism

To understand immediacy in news production, we need to look first at the role it has played in constructing the professional identity of journalists. Historically, those who had the fastest (and most reliable) information were likely to be successful. The rise of the commercial press emphasized the importance of immediacy as a critical factor in building relationships with audiences (Sommerville, 1996). This focus on periodicity was an ongoing feature driving innovation in the news from shipping news in the 16th century to carrier pigeons (Stephens, 2007) to telegraph wires (Blondheim, 1994) to faxes, satellite technology, and the Internet (Emery et al., 1997).

Similarly, immediacy is a defining pillar of the modern professional ideology of journalism. Ethnographers from the 1970s and 1980s observed the significance of immediacy in journalism. Schlesinger (1978) chronicled what he called a ‘stopwatch culture’ of immediacy in journalism as an obsessive professional concern of journalists; Epstein (1974), Gans (1979), Fishman (1980), and Tuchman (1978) chronicled the rush to finish work by what were then daily and weekly deadlines. As Deuze (2005) argues, journalists’ work has an ‘aura of instantaneity and immediatism, as news stresses the novelty of information as its defining principle’ and the process of news production ‘involves notions of speed, fast-decision making, hastiness, and working in accelerated real-time’ (p. 449).

What has changed in the era of online news is not only the speed at which news is created and distributed (Domingo, 2008) but also that every medium now shares the same deadline. Although television has had 24/7 news coverage since the early 1980s and live ‘rolling’ coverage has been fairly routine (Lewis and Cushion, 2009; Lewis et al., 2005), as Saltzis (2012) notes, online news has ‘borrowed’ from television and moved to a culture of constant and high-speed coverage. Immediacy’s power as a news value is more accentuated than ever before, its influence critical on the decision-making of journalists and quality of journalism itself (Karlsson 2011, 2012; Karlsson and Strömbäck, 2010).

Content studies underscore the rapid changes in news when journalists are focused on the immediate update. Saltzis (2012) found that most of the news stories studied across six UK news outlets were updated for a few hours and the stories rarely lasted more than a day online. Salaverría (2005) examined five news organizations during 9/11 as it happened and found that immediacy impacted content, while Karlsson’s (2012) study of Swine Flu coverage in Swedish news showed how frames could change throughout the day. The constant updates and the quest for fresh news can lead to mistakes (Usher, 2014b), and as Karlsson (2011) points out, ‘the “get it right” part [of journalism] is compromised by fast, inadequate news’ (p. 280).

Production studies that detail breaking news efforts reflect a constant obsession with updating in an effort to adapt to technological change. Klinenberg (2005) referred to the news production processes as a ‘news cyclone’; García Avilés et al. (2004) called journalists ‘mouse monkeys’ in their quest for speed and efficiency over quality, while Bockzowski found a culture of ‘imitation’ among competing news organizations. Usher (2014b) used the term ‘ASAP journalism’ to refer to a journalistic culture of incremental story updates for the Web. Starkman (2010) called the resulting practice of immediacy in the newsroom ‘hamster wheel journalism’ or volume for volume’s sake in a quest for clicks with little attention to quality. This article aims to move beyond the consideration of technological change to explore that the connection between immediacy and professional authority can yield further insight into why journalists are pursuing an immediate breaking news strategy and help scholars make larger claims about their practices.

Authority and temporality

The connection between journalistic authority and temporal patterns has received less attention from scholars, though how journalists use periodicity to structure both story narratives and work processes legitimatizes their role as authoritative truth-tellers. Generally, recent literature on journalistic authority tends to focus on ‘threats’ to authority such as blogs (Carlson, 2007; Singer, 2007), an increasingly active audience capable of ‘gatewatching’ and participatory content creation (Bruns, 2005), and NGOs producing their own content (Powers, 2015). Other factors contributing to an assault on journalists’ ‘right to be listened to’ (Carlson, 2016) include polarization, media convergence, legal decisions, networked technologies, and the changing relationships with sources. Audience approval ratings for journalism are at an all-time low (Dugan, 2014). When the connection between time and authority is considered, it is often discussed in the context of the mistakes made through high-speed news (Karlsson, 2011; Starkman, 2010), but questions of authority may be much broader.

The origins of contemporary journalistic authority can be explained in a variety of ways. Journalists engage in a professional project, where they claim authority over a system of knowledge through the work that they do (Abbott, 1988; Tuchman, 1978). Authority may also arise through the way that journalists talk about themselves (Zelizer, 1992). Scholars and journalists also argue that audience trust is a bedrock of journalistic authority; without trust, journalists are not listened to (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007). Authority may also come from sources, particularly by helping those in power achieve their specific goals (Cook, 1998). Ultimately, authority emerges from a variety of forces in the field of cultural production and rests on the acceptance of ‘a form of domination considered largely legitimate by those dominated in the field of cultural production’, (Anderson, 2008: 251). Perhaps one way to summarize this all is to say that journalistic authority is ‘relational’; it is, in part, an ongoing, discursive project. Carlson’s (2016) theory of relational authority is helpful as it takes into account the interactions of actors aside from journalists. He argues, ‘journalistic authority is a contingent relationship in which certain actors come to possess a right to create legitimate discursive knowledge through events in the worlds for others’ (p. 37).

Journalistic authority also emerges through temporal patterns and practices. Being first and fast (and right) establishes the professional authority of journalists (Karlsson, 2011) – to audiences and among the journalists themselves (Schlesinger, 1978). As Neiger and Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2016) point out, the language used to reflect changing temporal patterns also reflects how much journalists know at a specific moment in time. Journalistic terms such as the ‘tick tock’ and the ‘second day story’ (Usher, 2014a) reflect the ability of newspapers to recreate events to make them more understandable to the audience, and in turn, to communicate their authoritative version of events. Scannell (2014) similarly articulates how different temporal language used in broadcast journalism reflects changes in authority during unfolding events. New discussions about slow journalism (Le Masurier, 2015) and contextual journalism (Fink and Schudson, 2014) explore how long-form journalism enables a particular expertise moving closer to sociological inquiry; not only is more time required for the story but also the piece of journalism itself moves beyond immediate events to look at social phenomena.

In the past, the distinctions between temporal patterns among different types of news media had allowed them to exert a specific domain of journalistic authority. All news organizations are deadline-driven, and all news organizations chase breaking news, but until recently, they have done so in different ways. The different temporal patterns for local television news, national network news broadcasts, newspapers (metropolitan and national), radio, wires, online-only publications, and cable may have allowed each control over a particular type of story at a particular time. Today, though, this has changed, as everyone has the same deadline (NOW!), contesting and complicating the particular claim that newspapers developed in the 20th century to a comprehensive overview of the world as told through the lens of daily print journalism (Jackaway, 1995). One might then think of relational authority existing within the interpretive community of journalists itself, perhaps with an associated hierarchy for the legitimation of knowledge (Meltzer, 2009; Zelizer, 1992). The authority journalists are trying to claim with high-speed news may be in tension with their attempt to uphold their claim to distinctive news unique to their legacy platforms.

Some of the rhetoric in the future of news debates has claimed that the demise of the metropolitan newspaper will be extremely harmful because these news organizations are the most significant in a city’s news ecology (Jones, 2009; Meyer, 2009). There is indeed some evidence that metropolitan newspapers produce most of the original news content in a city (Pew Research Center, 2010), and might be directly correlated to voter turnout (Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido, 2009). Some argue newspapers have a special civic and cultural relationship with communities (Boyle, 2014). However, it also seems to be a particular conceit of journalists and of journalism critics to associate newspaper journalists as most important and most authoritative (Meltzer, 2009); there is also considerable evidence that the public might consider network and local television news a key source of information (Pew Research Center, 2015). Regardless of who is ‘more authoritative’, now, newspapers and local television are both breaking stories in real time. If a goal of this article is to look beyond technological impacts on news production, the need to consider the complexity of the relational authority between newspapers and TV is critical.

A new temporal relationship with the competition is just one component of the changing relational nature of journalistic authority. Journalists also have a new, immediate relationship with the audience. Journalists can be obsessive in their quest to use Web metrics to try to understand how their content appeals to audience preferences (Anderson, 2011; Usher, 2013). But now, in addition to daily traffic numbers, journalists also have real-time feedback from analytics companies – creating what Petre (2015) observes is a high-stakes culture in a newsroom where poor traffic performance has emotional costs, influences editorial content, affects job security, and impacts the minute-by-minute news judgment of journalists. The new considerations of the competition, of audiences, and how journalists in light of a focus on immediate updates might, in turn, impact a metropolitan newspaper’s ‘right to be listened to’ (Carlson, 2016).

Methodology

As part of a larger project on newsroom transformation, four metropolitan newsrooms were selected using a number of criteria, including size, ownership, and geographic location: ¹ The Des Moines Register, The Miami Herald, The Star-Telegram, and The Seattle Times. Three were owned by large chains; The Seattle Times owned by a family. The South, Southeast, Midwest, and Pacific Northwest of the United States are represented in order to provide geographic diversity and avoid focusing on the Northeast, which is over-represented in US dialogue about the changing media landscape. These newsrooms share roughly similar circulation numbers, staff sizes, dire economic prospects with recent histories of cutbacks and layoffs, and serve roughly equal-sized metropolitan regions. As a result, these four newspapers offer some representation of both diversity and conformity across the metropolitan news landscape of the United States, providing the potential for generalization as well as departures, ideal in case study selection (Stake, 1995).

Following site selection, the researcher planned field visits, two to Miami and Des Moines and one each to Fort Worth and Seattle for a total of six 4–5-day visits between April and November 2013; 122 interviews were gathered across these newsrooms, with a minimum of 21 interviews at each site visit. Interviews were conducted across a wide hierarchy of journalists with care to include a diverse but representative sample of positions and demographics, with an eye toward developing samples that were consistent across each newsroom. Additional field observation complemented the research, including observing web staff, attending story planning and budget meetings, and observing journalists. Journalists are identified by their general positions.

Analysis of the data proceeded first through identifying key concepts, codes, and then categories while in dialogue with extant theory (Corbin and Strauss, 2014). Specifically, codes and concepts relating to breaking news were identified and further explored in the context of three major themes: definitions, motivations, and self-assessments. The data selected here due to the brevity of the journal format is the best and clearest articulation of each theme with an eye toward representing the news organizations studied.

Findings

Metropolitan newspaper journalists have reshaped their news production processes to pursue incremental updates in an attempt to gain the attention of audiences. Data from the field reveals that the breaking news format in metropolitan newspapers has expanded to include content thought more likely to appeal to audiences – content that can also be found on local television broadcasts and their Web sites, prompting ambiguity among journalists about the value of this approach. Journalists express their motivations for adjusting their workflow to focus primarily on breaking news as a means to increase traffic, beat the competition, and retain audiences; moreover, they are motivated to do so in part to justify their own significance to themselves as journalists. Ultimately, these work patterns and content decisions can all be viewed more broadly as an attempt to retain their authoritative role in a community.

Covering incremental news

Newspaper journalists define online breaking news as coverage of unfolding events that can be constantly updated for the Web. These stories rely on journalists funneling back live updates from the field, but even sometimes the editors directing this coverage acknowledge that these efforts don’t produce what they see as quality journalism, just material for the 24/7 Web. However, these journalists also see incremental updates as nonetheless critical to maintaining the newspaper’s position as a comprehensive source of information for the city.

An anecdote from The Miami Herald reflects this finding. On 24 April 2013, at 7.45 a.m., the online editor heard about a boat fire in nearby Fort Lauderdale – he said he learned of it from the police scanner, but local TV was broadcasting live and had updates online. He immediately wrote a quick update for the Web site based on the scanner with the note ‘More to come’.

A Miami Herald journalist was at the scene, and phoned in new content to the online editor, including photos and contributions from a witness, later put on the phone. The online editor told me, ‘This will lead the Web [until] the meeting’, meaning it would be featured prominently at least until 10.30 a.m. He took two other calls from the scene and relied on a blog post from the reporter to flesh out the evolving story.

Later, at the morning meeting with all the editors present, the online editor said he didn’t expect many more developments from the boat fire, and that this story might only receive a blurb in the print paper. The morning’s most dramatic story in the local news ecosystem required at least seven substantial updates for the Web site, but after the intensity of the moment, simply wasn’t news of much consequence. Nonetheless, when asked, the editor explained he felt he needed to have the story: ‘We’re The Miami Herald. We need to be comprehensive’. At the same time, the story offered little more than the spectacle of breaking news serving the Web, underscoring the tension between trying to claim authority based on a high-speed news story, and then diminishing its importance when placed in its legacy platform, print, which invokes its own logic of journalistic authority. ²

Continuously updated animal stories are also now standard sources of breaking news in metropolitan newspapers, to the point at which one Seattle Times journalist expressed in a meeting, ‘Are there too many animal stories in the paper?’ Over the course of 2 days, stories about a harbor porpoise, an orca who had come back to Seattle after many years to bear her young, and four potentially dangerous pit bulls on the loose had all graced the home page, all as continuously updated breaking news.

On 9 July 2013, when a reporter monitoring the police noticed there were pit bulls on the loose and TV stations were covering the story, urgency hit the newsroom. The breaking news editor shouted,

There are 4 pit bulls on the loose – who is doing it? One has been shot by cops. Where is our guy? Where is the desk guy? It’s at 3500 Morgan in West Seattle. The cops are cowering, there are people tweeting – is anyone on it?

Someone else shouted back, ‘No, we, just heard about it’, and then after a pause, ‘OK, [X reporter] heard about it’, also adding that there was new information that a 4-year-old was also potentially involved.

The breaking news editor began posting live updates on the ‘Today File’, a prominent blog specifically focused on breaking news linked on the home page. He waited for new updates from the scene and was ready to post any new details that surfaced (such as the presence of the child). I asked an editor about whether this was worth the attention of the newspaper and she replied, ‘This is a more TV story than anything’, but then when pushed about why The Seattle Times was even pursing the story, she added, ‘We will provide more context than TV’. Notably, The Seattle Times’ top editors had told me during initial interviews about their high standards for breaking news (which, in fact, had merited Pulitzers in 2010 and 2014), but were nonetheless chasing stories about pit bulls on the loose for the Web. This story was somewhat disparagingly just a ‘TV story’, but it nonetheless filled the Web with content, and perhaps could be acceptable to the newspaper if it was done better.

Journalists also note that their newspapers have increasingly focused on sensational crime and disaster updates, noting that these stories tend to do particularly well in terms of traffic numbers. As one journalist in The Des Moines explained, ‘They want a story about murder. Those are the most popular fucking stories’. In Miami, a reporter explained the pressure of putting up these crime stories quickly, ‘If there is a shooting in Miami Gardens, I have to get a paragraph up’. As home page editor in Fort Worth put it, ‘The internet is for crime’. But whether this kind of crime news, from boat fires to shootings, ought to be the focus of rapid updates and the attention of newspapers is questionable.

Reporters, too, are unsure of whether incremental updates actually make any sense, but they do them anyway. Breaking news is sometimes conjured from events that would otherwise not merit breaking status. A journalist in Miami doubted the importance of providing constant updates in real time for every aspect of courts or police activity she monitored for her beat, no matter how routine, saying ‘I do this because they ask me to’, while a reporter in Seattle thought it was ‘stupid’ to live tweet school board meetings because no one was paying any attention, and the information didn’t have much significance to most people. However, other journalists were convinced that incremental updates did allow them to stand out; the airline industry reporter in Fort Worth was accustomed to writing short blog posts as quickly as she could during and after major industry press conferences. Her sentiment was that her beat was nationally competitive because American Airlines is based in Fort Worth, however, and thought that her speed might distinguish her among the crowd.

As we can see, the subjects metropolitan newspapers pursue for breaking news on the Web – boat fires, school board meetings, pit bulls on the lose – are ones that have dubious standing even within the newsroom as significant and worthy of coverage. In fact, when The Miami Herald put together its print paper, the boat fire wasn’t of much importance. The focus on immediacy in the newsroom created emphasis on different kinds of stories, ones that absent the 24/7 time pressure often failed to merit much significance according to the judgment of editors and reporters. In fact, the only reporter who steadfastly considered her incremental updates noteworthy was a reporter working on a nationally significant beat. Thus, a key finding emerges; journalists pursue stories online that do not accord with their own standards of good journalism if they were to consider the same stories when the minute-to-minute time pressure is removed. If newspapers pursue stories that they don’t think are worthy just for the sake of keeping up online, they may in turn be undermining their overall authority within the metropolitan news ecology – either as it relates to readers, other journalists, or newspaper journalists themselves. In chasing animal stories or boat fires, newspaper journalists are undermining their own value – their comprehensive stories about topics that are often given short shrift by other types of news media. What’s particularly concerning is that journalists don’t even think these updates are meaningful but feel they have to pursue them anyway.

Why pursue incremental updates?

Now that we can see that breaking news culture is firmly ensconced in the metropolitan newsroom – albeit in a contested way – it is also important to try to understand just why journalists feel compelled to pursue a strategy of these immediate breaking news updates online. The research reveals that journalists explain the need for breaking news practices as an obsessive quest for traffic, the relentless desire to beat local television, and a fear of being irrelevant, compulsions that in turn may undermine their standing in local news ecology among audiences, the competition, and among themselves.

Discussion

Beating the competition, economic survival, and concerns about professional authority may have been present since the dawn of modern journalism (Carlson, 2016; Stephens, 2007), but this research underscores how the tensions that emerge among these professional goals are heightened in the context of contemporary journalism. Overall, these breaking news production practices can be seen as an underlying attempt to stave off an assault on journalists’ authority; however, the changes journalists are making may ultimately destroy what little claim to authority they may have left. Today’s media environment highlights the conflict between different professional goals: satisfying audiences and beating the competition might be one way for newspaper journalists to remain relevant in a city’s news ecology; on the other hand, pursuing these goals also might undermine their ability to produce the kind of news that made them distinctive and valuable to a community. The way that journalists talk about these new production practices reveals a number of conflicting findings: journalists pursue news that they think is not necessarily valuable, but at the same time immediate news is almost a compulsion. Journalists worry about looking bad compared to the competition (local TV) – and see justification of their worth as journalists when they beat TV, but their work ends up looking like the competition.

We can see that the move to incremental updates is intimately bound up in questions about the newspaper’s authority within a city. This authority is the result of discursive positioning among various actors; seen here as the way that journalists understand their audiences, the way that they understand their competition in the media landscape – principally television, and their standing within the larger profession. Journalists choose to pursue breaking news to please audiences; they fear if they do not have up-to-the-minute breaking news, they will lose these audiences. And without readers that trust, respect, and rely on the newspaper, the newspaper ultimately loses its power within the community. Real-time traffic numbers provide instant feedback about the worth of a story – audiences validate journalists’ work when they click on these breaking news stories. Each click might be a pathway to economic success, but it is also a quantifiable data point that underscores that the news has mattered to the audience. If journalistic authority is based in part on audiences paying attention to journalists’ work, every incremental news update presents a new quantifiable measure of whether audiences actually care about metropolitan newspaper journalism.

Similarly, journalistic authority is also relational among the larger interpretative community of journalists within the city. Now that all news institutions have the same deadline, newspaper journalists feel threatened by television journalists because everyone is chasing the same story. Losing to television is professionally unsettling. Newspapers are jockeying to be first and fast in order to emerge at the top of what they perceive as the media hierarchy in a city; how powerful they perceive themselves to be depends on whether they beat TV for these stories. Professional worth is bound up in whether newspapers get a story before TV, and at a time where journalistic authority is under assault, these small daily triumphs result in emails from top executives meant to shore up morale inside the newsroom.

Authority is bound up in professional logics as well. We have a situation where journalists are also questioning their own power to tell meaningful stories, and they are concerned about their own ability to still deliver what they see as the well-regarded, complete, and thoughtful journalism in a city. They don’t talk about authority this way on a day-to-day basis, but these concerns emerge through the contradictory assessments from journalists about the perception of the quality of news they are producing. While metropolitan newspaper journalists are eager to chase breaking news, it’s worth considering the stories they pursue: animal stories and sensational crime stories, and any tidbit of news that might come from a humdrum school board meeting – just in case there’s an immediate update that might feed the Web. On one hand, the journalists are excited by these stories; they chase them, and the energy in the newsroom is palpable to an observer. On the other hand, the side comments, the positioning of stories in the print newspaper – with its specific temporal patterns, and the denigration of a story as a typical ‘TV story’ versus a ‘newspaper story’ suggests that these journalists do not actually see these stories as quality journalism – or at least stories that are in keeping with their traditional standards for news. The Fort Worth journalist wished she could do the kind of stories The New York Times does, but she didn’t feel that she could pursue them because they didn’t seem to result in traffic. The erosion of this claim to do what journalists see as quality newspaper journalism ultimately brings significant costs to the professional role conceptions of these journalists and has already been shown here to affect their desire in times of limited resources to pursue what may be more socially significant stories. Overall, these attempts to retain professional authority go far beyond just an attempt at economic survival, though economics are important; journalists’ own account underscores how deeply these production practices are rooted in how they understand their own significance.

There are a number of key points of departure that raise questions for researchers as well as for the future of newspapers. Here, we have suggested that a focus on immediacy is also bound up in questions of authority: the way newspapers journalists perceive themselves in relation to their audiences, their competition, their economic fortune, and ultimately, to each other. Researchers have started to track ‘impact’ beyond just traffic measures (Abelson and Keller, 2015) but as social impact, and the future work might consider whether these new measures could potentially reshape the current patterns of news work. Additional work to further substantiate observations about story choices made by newspapers and their TV counterparts from a content and production standpoint is warranted. Comparative work in other countries facing similar pressures on metropolitan news could find points of departure and similarity. This article attempts to answer how temporal patterns are connected to broader notions of authority, and it finds that motivations for a move to incremental breaking news is a way for journalists to retain power over audiences, the competition, and establish their own worth, all the while trying – and sometimes failing – to justify the significance of their work to themselves. Whether this strategy ultimately makes a difference in the ability of these newspapers to legitimatize themselves as a city’s most respected truth-teller remains to be seen.