The 24-hour news cycle (or 24/7 news cycle) is 24-hour investigation and reporting of news, concomitant with fast-paced

lifestyles Lifestyle often refers to: * Lifestyle (sociology), the way a person lives * ''Otium'', ancient Roman concept of a lifestyle * Style of life (german: Lebensstil, link=no), dealing with the dynamics of personality Lifestyle may also refer to: Bus ...

. The vast news resources available in recent decades have increased competition for audience and advertiser attention, prompting media providers to deliver the latest news in the most compelling manner in order to remain ahead of competitors. Television-, radio-, print-, online- and mobile app news media all have many suppliers that want to be relevant to their audiences and deliver news first. A complete news cycle consists of the media reporting on some event, followed by the media reporting on public and other reactions to the earlier reports. The advent of 24-hour cable and

satellite television Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location. The signals are received via an outdoor parabolic antenna com ...

news channels and, in more recent times, of news sources on the World Wide Web (including

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in Reverse ...

s), considerably shortened this process.

History

Although all-news radio operated for decades earlier, the 24-hour news cycle arrived with the advent of

cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with bro ...

channels dedicated to news and brought about a much faster pace of news production with an increased demand for stories that could be presented as continual news with constant updating. The O. J. Simpson murder case in 1994 and 1995 created the 24-hour news cycle and ushered in the era of cable news. This was a contrast with the day-by-day pace of the news cycle of printed

daily newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, spor ...

s. A high premium on faster reporting would see a further increase with the advent of online news.

Critical assessment

According to former journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, 24-hour news creates wild competition among media organizations for

audience share Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites. Sometim ...

. This, coupled with the

profit demand In economics, profit maximization is the short run or long run process by which a firm may determine the price, input and output levels that will lead to the highest possible total profit (or just profit in short). In neoclassical economics, whi ...

of their corporate ownership, has led to a decline in journalistic standards. In their book ''Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media'', they write that "the press has moved toward sensationalism,

entertainment Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousa ...

, and opinion" and away from traditional values of verification, proportion,

relevance Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sc ...

, depth, and quality of interpretation. They fear these values will be replaced by a "journalism of assertion" which de-emphasizes whether a claim is valid and encourages putting a claim into the arena of public discussion as quickly as possible.

History

Critical assessment

See also

References

Further reading