What Breaking News Is — And Isn’t
CNN’s management of its news alerts during the GOP debate has been shameful — and bad for the news industry.
CNN is known, as a network, for being the first and more to point, for being the first on the ground. If there’s a war, a catastrophe, a death, you tune into CNN because they’re probably already on site. The quality of their coverage is something that we could debate all night — but there are people better than me for that and they have often already done it. Generally though, CNN is the first to “reach” the story.
Which is why, as a journalist, I have CNN Breaking News alerts on my phone (along with many many other alerts from many many other news organisations). For a while now though, I have wanted to turn them off — and in no day has that will been more pressing than today.
CNN’s digital team has decided that every other statement by the GOP candidates merits a breaking news alert. At first, this was just incredibly annoying as statements in a political debate are the opposite of breaking news. But then something worse happened: an earthquake of 8.3 magnitude (in a scale 0–9.0 btw) hit the coast of Chile, triggering tsumani alerts and leading the government to evacuate large sections of the country’s coast (another FYI, Chile has a massive coastline). As per usual, CNN was the first to the story — but you wouldn’t have seen it if, like me, your first instinct was to immediate delete a push notification about whatever Trump or Paul said. And that is just shocking.
News organisations are hungry for clicks, which are a measure for advertising rates and thus money. So, for a while now, they have been pushing Breaking News alerts that often aren’t really so (CNN isn’t alone: the New York Times does it too, as does the BBC, though a lot less). It’s a bad practice and it should be avoided: if you use up the attention I reserve for truly important issues with trivial ones, in the long run you will lose both credibility and the ability to lay claim to my time. As pings go by, I will pay less and less attention to you — and as such, will click less on your alerts. I may even turn them off altogether.
However, a bad practice that is kept up at times of ACTUAL breaking news is even worse. Somehow, someone at the CNN headquarters is telling me that an earthquake that could, by morning, have killed people and destroyed parts of a country is equally or more important to 11 men debating for a campaign that hasn’t even started. To act as if these things have the same news value is scary: they don’t and if someone out there thinks they do, we’re doomed. What’s more, they lack the ability to distinguish between political discourse and what truly IS news. CNN, for its mistakes, has always been able to tell you, what is the most important news.
Breaking News alerts should be reserved for things that are both BREAKING and NEWS, things that can’t be predicted, things that aren’t planned or expected, things that have an immediate effect on the lives and fates of many: terrorist attacks, explosions, natural disasters, deaths of world leaders, conflicts breaking out. They’re the Tianjin explosion, the Peshawar attack, the Paris attacks, the London and Madrid bombings, 9/11 and the death of JFK. It’s Churchill going to war with Germany. Everything else can be a “normal” news alerts, live coverage, a dual system that users of news apps can subscribe to, whatever. Something smarter than putting Trump’s statements alongside the lives of dozens or hundreds of people.
