The shifting temporalities of online news: The Guardian’s website from 1996 to 2015

Abstract

As much as news websites news can be characterised by speed and immediacy, they are also recognisable online periodicals, which accumulate preceding news items. This is, as with the constitution of time in general, linked to relations between change and continuity. This article aims to understand how the temporalities of online news have developed since the first news sites in the mid-1990s. The analytical starting point for this is that such temporalities must be understood as a complex interplay between textual elements on different and overlapping levels of the webpage. This article consequently employs a framework for webpage analysis that primarily focuses on the syntactical level where temporalities emerge as relations between textual elements that change at very different intervals. This framework is applied to examples from the different stages of The Guardian’s webpage from 1996 to the present retrieved from the Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ). The shifting constitutions of time that emerge through these analyses point towards how journalistic practices have interacted with and adopted the possibilities of the digital. Due to an inbuilt instability between textual elements on stored websites (as well as other characteristics of online archives), the construction of the empirical base stands in a complex relation to the analytical framework applied. As much as the article is a historical analysis of the temporality of online news, it, thus, also offers a range of methodological considerations as well as thoughts on avenues for further study of how journalism constitutes time within different institutional settings and on different media platforms.

The Temporal Nature of Mobile Push Notification Alerts: A Study of European News Outlets’ Dissemination Patterns

“…Echoing Peters, "thinking 'spatio-temporally' helps us distinguish the unique from the routine, the extraordinary from the ordinary, the significant from the mundane" (2015, 10). However, the temporal dimensions of journalism go beyond story content (Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2014) as production and consumption times are also crucial when estimating the importance of journalism (Bødker and Br€ ugger 2018) and how audiences engage with the news (Steensen, Ferrer-Conill, and Peters 2020). Ubiquitous mobile connectivity and multiplatform publishing outlets have led to hyper-immediacy where journalists, in the pursuit of breaking stories and providing constant updates, can produce confusing and misleading reporting (Karlsson 2011).…”

Herramientas e indicadores para el análisis de la temporalidad en el periodismo digital y el documental interactivo

“…La necesidad de observar y analizar los flujos informativos, la modificación temporal y el ciclo de vida de los textos periodísticos en el entorno digital ha permitido llevar a cabo metodologías cualitativas específicas (Karlsoon; Stromback, 2010; Karlsoon, 2012; Widholm, 2016; Buhl; Günther; Quandt, 2016; Rodrigo, 2017; Zelizer, 2018) focalizadas en la inmediatez de la noticia periodística, su permanencia en red y transformación temporal. Estos métodos se han mostrado eficaces, entre otros, en la investigación sobre las rutinas periodísticas en la cobertura de acontecimientos de actualidad (Lu; Zhou, 2016) y en análisis longitudinales sobre la variabilidad de la información en la web (Bødker;Brügger, 2018). Sin embargo, no contemplan el estudio de los relatos periodísticos de gran dimensión, propios del documental interactivo, que responden a dinámicas de producción y consumo diferenciadas del flujo informativo diario y que precisan, necesariamente, de una aproximación multimodal y transmedia (Hiippala, 2017;Van-Krieken, 2018, Freixa et al, 2014aFreixa, 2015).…”

Understanding openness through (in)visible platform boundaries: a topological study on MOOCs as multiplexes of spaces and times

“…All these pages follow a particular structure: contributions of learners and teachers are delineated in comment-and reply boxes, are labelled by a name, a photo and a date. The comments are ordered chronologically, which creates a sense of linear time, yet it also emphasizes the asynchronous nature of the interactions (Bødker & Brügger, 2018). Moreover, the lines around the text boxes and the individual 'signatures' withhold contributions to merge into a different form like, for example, a Wiki.…”

“…That is, traces on the EMMA interface show a high peak of interactions within particular periods and on particular pages, namely, those of page-courses that are announced to be 'active' and closing soon (see Fig. 3 announced dates operate as spatiotemporal boundaries that establish a 'current time' or a 'synchronous' time that is typical for a classroom (Bødker & Brügger, 2018;Leaton Gray, 2017). This network topology is, thus, spatiotemporally forming a co-presence and bounds a common path with shared spaces-times in which learners can attach to each other rather than merely attaching to the same surface ( Fig.…”