A few weeks ago at work, we had a live, ongoing story. The number of updates throughout the day was quite head spinning for the people producing the stories, let alone for readers and the people the story was actually about.
A small number of readers took time to comment that the reporters who were bashing out copy faster than most people can speak were contradicting themselves, undermining what they had written earlier. In actual fact, it was testament to the reporters that they were keeping up with the way the story was swaying from one extreme to the other, in such a short period of time.
What struck me about it though (aside from the perception of some readers) was how two-and-a-half years of being primarily a web journalist has distorted my perceptions of news values. For wrong or for right, I was unintentionally valuing new stories over ones with slightly stronger lines.
Such is the demand for the latest and newest online, I was predisposed to whack newer stories higher up the list of articles, without a second thought. This particular day, I left the office only to get home and see someone had uploaded the latest story below the previous top story. I text him to ask if he wanted me to bump up the new story and the reply that came back was ‘Nah, I think the [previous] story has a stronger line than the new one. I’ll leave it as it is.” He is a print reporter who dabbles online. The Ying to my Yang, if you will.
A sound decision. But after a day of being thrown in to make sure we were first with what has happening, it seemed a little alien to me. Then I realised I’d been suckered in by the Sky Sports News syndrome, where any story is labelled breaking news and has a heavy impact graphic and scrolling text on the Yellow Bar of Doom. Whether or not it was the giddyness of a rather hectic day or a more worrying symptom of an ongoing distortion of my news values, I don’t know.
Of a day, it is not normally an issue. The amount of truly breaking news stories that vie for the top few slots on the website are relatively few, so it is easy enough to apply news values in a more considered manner. But when it is all kicking off, it would seem it is easy to get carried away with the chance to go big on something, just because it is ‘breaking’.
With web news, the tendency is to favour the latest lines rather than the best ones. Perhaps the level of detachment from the moment of happening, helps to look at stories in the manner they should be. Stepping away from the immediacy provides a better evaluation of what makes the stories more newsworthy.