The Time(s) Of News Websites

Temporal affordances in the news

“…In addition, a fixation of news stories over time can encourage the creation of tighter stand-alone stories, with a more complete temporal arc. Thus, while digital stories may have a patchy, layered structure of temporalities (Bødker, 2016), we have found that the concise narrative told by the headlines and leads of print news stories tends to encompass a larger part of the temporal spectrum than that told in the headlines and lead of online news (Neiger and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2016).…”

“…Two contrasting affordances, each offering incentives for a different set of journalistic practices, are transience and fixation in time. Transience, particularly in online news, allows for incremental storytelling and therefore gradual temporal layering, including the constant updating of news stories to account for the most recent developments, as well as the addition of contextual information and links to past stories (Bødker, 2016;Usher, 2014). It also supports the value of immediacy, since it lowers the stakes of mistakes.…”

“…While the extended-retrievability affordance is relevant for journalists in all types of media, since all news media are operating within the new information environment, it opens unique opportunities for online journalism. As a result of the networked nature of the online environment, and in particular the ability to directly link to previous stories and other types of data and texts, the online environment supports a rich temporal structure based on the connectivity and interrelationships between various textual elements (Bødker, 2016). In addition, the combination of extended retrievability and the affordance of interactivity facilitates the production of interactive infographics, which allow readers to explore longitudinal trends, as well as to simulate different future scenarios (e.g.…”

Confronting Uncertainty: The Contours of an Inferential Community

“…This type of knowledge is first related to the “disclosure of the fact itself, in all its singularity” (Meditsch, 2005, p. 130). Yet the knowledge constituted through journalism is also drawn out over time in the sense that news gains further meaning (or becomes knowledge) as it accumulates as social or public memory (Bødker, 2016, 2019). Put differently, because news involves a somewhat systematic reporting of events, it (ideally) offers continuous relevance for understanding and navigating the everyday.…”

Epilogue: Timing the study of news temporality

“…Wildholm's (2015) discussion of the tireless pace of digital updating underscores the simultaneous embodiment of fast and slow in the same news content. The fruitful notion of 'accumulated contemporaneity' (Bodker, 2016) -the paradoxical systematic combination of chronicling and archiving, or looking sideways and backwards, by which the meaning of a news event is progressively crafted -challenges simple assumptions of speed in discussions of news temporality. And the ability to ferret out more temporal moments than has been typically articulated -a distinction between the 'immediate-past' and 'recent past', for instance (Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger, 2015) -speaks to the need to problematize the spaces separating fast from slow.…”