Reading Time: 6 minutes

I was a newspaper carrier as a kid. That has started to inform some of my thinking about how to consume the news these days. We are seeing that information ingesting is increasingly designed to be disruptive or outright damaging. It is a mixture of many things: small, portable devices, 24-hour news cycles, data harvesting information services, dis- and mis-information, auto-generated and unverifiable content, and so on. It is not a solvable problem from the production side. It feels as though staying informed is taking far more time—including the increased likelihood of being asked to verify I’m a human before viewing any new website—that there has to be a better way. While I used to try to balance breadth and depth, I feel like this isn’t the right approach.

It’s funny to think back to what we did as paper carriers. The whole bag-over-the-shoulder thing, walking door-to-door in our little village, rain or shine. At one house, you’d put the paper inside the screen door. At another, you’d put it in the mailbox or in an alcove or whatever unique location the subscriber wanted. I wrapped them in thirds (I didn’t have to do a roll to throw) and stuffed my bag with as many as I could carry. The paper would get delivered before dinner or, on weekends, before breakfast.

It was a local and, for the most part, sole newspaper that folks received at their house. It was one of three common news sources, including radio and television news. At least at that time, most of these news sources were heavily curated, to fit within a certain number of pages or within a 30 or 60 minute TV segment. It seems quaint now but there was a certain acceptance, perhaps based on trust or tradition or mere availability, that you would learn all the news you needed.

We talk about a 24-hour news cycle now but it has always been there. It just wasn’t documented in the same way. Items that didn’t meet one day’s deadline were moved to the next day, if they weren’t bumped by other stories. But the constraint of time or physical space meant that editorial selections were being made to fill the available resources. The difference we have now is that we may have 24 hours of TV or a web server storage system with endless capacity and so, while there is still often editorial direction, the resource dynamic is different.

I am not confident that there *is* much editorial direction any longer. Humans slow down content delivery and even platforms that do not default solely to AI generated content may still not include much editorial oversight. Media platforms are no longer clear on who is a journalist following ethical standards when they publish heavy doses of opinion content

The elimination of a time or space resource constraint means that information creators can fill every moment of the day with new information. Since new information can be monetized, whether through subscriptions or advertising, it makes sense that a creator would want to create as much new content as possible. As the Wikipedia entry on the 24-hour news cycle puts it:

the 24-hour news cycle ... 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

24-hour news cycle, Wikipedia

It’s that “continual news with constant updating” part that is at the core of what I struggle with. I understand the economic imperative to follow that approach. I just do not believe it creates value for the news consumer. My news feed is filled what “what we know” stories after an event has happened, incrementally expanding on details. Often, this seems to be a way to journal about social media posts, data aggregator profiles, and other public record information about people involved in the event. Currency overwhelms relevance, sometimes even accuracy.

Here’s an example. Al Jazeera has been doing a daily “what’s happening” on the U.S.’s unlawful aggression against Iran. It’s a way to create daily content rather than focus on what is important. As you can see from one headline, one day there were actual bombings: that’s a headline on its own. Most of the rest is incrementalism. The failure to focus causes their own content to become more diffuse. This is not a particular platform problem. You can find the same thing with the weird “live blogs” that have to be summarized for posterity like on the BBC or even resources like the Guardian’s “minute by minute” page.

Who is this audience? I. Haven’t. Time!

A list of search results all of which have the headline “what’s happening on Iran war day [number]”

I get the same feeling when I feel like I’m reading inside baseball. Until I moved back to Chicago in 2024, I didn’t follow legal news closely. I have since stopped because so much of it is incrementalist insider content filler. One of the places I noticed it were when whole posts would appear on Law.com or Law360 or Above The Law about disqualification motions. I’m not missing the importance of those motions; it’s whether they would be newsworthy if you were not trying to constantly refill a 24-hour fire hose of information.

For those folks who do care about these motions, is just-in-case news reporting ever going to overcome just-in-time research? Fragmented information delivery turns a topical item into a constant prairie dogging (oh, look, another, oh look, ...) which arrives piecemeal and not at a time (or for the person) it can be made actionable. On the other hand, news about disqualification motions might reflect a pervasive trend but that would take time to germinate.

A list of headlines about disqualification motions in US courts. This list is based on a search; they are frequent but do not happen all in a chunk.

On the one hand, I worry a bit about

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