Coverage of Breaking News by UK News Sites

Hamburg.
The next speaker in this interesting ECREA 2010 session is Kostas Saltzis, whose focus is on the coverage of breaking news by UK Websites. Online journalistic practices here tend to focus on updating and maintaining online stories; this is a break from the newspaper approach that necessitated stories to be finished ahead of sending the daily paper to the presses.

24/7 news cycles mean that breaking news must be covered immediately, at any time, however, and this challenges the status of the news story as a finished product. Debate here may sometimes focus more on the speed rather than the quality of journalistic work; this is due also to increased competition. There are now no deadlines associated with continuous coverage, but certain newsroom routines remain unchanged.

Kostas examined six UK news Websites, with an emphasis on breaking news stories, and studied updating practices. The time element in this was extremely crucial, of course – the interest here is in comparing all the updated versions of specific stories, with a view to what information was added, whether corrections or omissions were made, and what sources were used and/or added.

The stories observed here were updated four times on average; the initial story was usually very brief, and information was added as it came to hand. Usually, however, updating activities were limited to a few hours – very few stories continued to be edited over the course of an entire day. If news events unfolded over more than a day, news stories morphed into stories on different aspects of the event (opinions, reactions, etc.), and more links were added.

Sky News was most active in updating (9.5 updates per story), while The Sun was least active (1.5 updates); the pattern here follows the newspaper / broadcast divide: broadcasters already work within an update-focussed mindset, it seems. On average, updates happened every 67 minutes, and ceased after 3 hours 50; most updates tended to happen early on in a story’s lifetime, though.

Updates tended to lead to a steady increase in word length, starting often with some very short news items (roughly the length of a tweet), and almost every update added material (as opposed to correcting or even removing content). On the extremes of the scale, Sky News added an average of 52 words per update; The Guardian 191 words. Most frequently, updates made clarifications and added new sources and background information; an average of 3 sources were added per update, and they were usually quoted directly by the journalist. Over half the updates also added more from existing sources, and in the process of editing the order of sources also changed frequently.

So, overall there’s a great emphasis on the speed of updates early on; at the same time, daily news cycles remain still, as updates cease and institutional updating traditions persist. Stories are not very often corrected, and editing does happen but mainly adds sources. There are also notable differences between news organisations.