‘Breaking News’ is broken. Let’s fix it.
We really need to stop calling everything “breaking.”
You guys. Let’s get real here for a minute. How often do you see something labeled “BREAKING NEWS” that is neither breaking nor news?
Sometimes, “BREAKING NEWS” is a scheduled press conference…
…or, well… whatever it is.
THAT. IS. NOT. BREAKING. NEWS.
When you cheapen the idea of what constitutes “news” and what “breaking” means, you cheapen your standing as a news outlet. Fox news flashes the “FOX NEWS ALERT” on just about anything.
Breaking news is a joke. No, really, it is.
In the wake of the Boston bombing, there was a lot of incorrect and not-so-breaking “BREAKING” news alerts. The Onion took the media to task.
WATERTOWN, MA-Citing exhaustive use of the word "breaking" to preface media coverage of today's ongoing manhunt for one…www.theonion.com
Still, things seem to have only gotten worse, since, and it’s nowhere near the only problem with modern news.
Really, though, what’s going on with journalism, in general?
I think it relates to something I wrote about a little while back: the media’s insatiable thirst for Fresh Content™ to fight for a limited number of eyeballs. Much as the media tends to embellish details to make for more sensational headlines (see: my post on the media’s manufactured outrage), it presents other stories as being more important than they really are — hence the obsession with labeling things as “BREAKING.”
If you can pre-schedule it, it is not breaking news.
That AP alert about midnight on New Year’s Eve? Yeah, that’s not breaking news. Nor are scheduled press conferences.
Ground rules exist for news consumers, so how about some for news producers?
That’s in the hands of editorial teams around the world to sort out, but hopefully they come to understand that cheapening news for the sake of some sort term traffic won’t help their long-term reputations as media outlets.
