When Breaking News is Broken

This is one of those things the public doesn't notice. At least, not at first. And that's precisely how the news media manages to get away with it.

The "it" in this scenario is breaking news. How it's handled is a vital indicator of the health of a news outlet.?Generally, news consumers don't track this sort of thing. In fact, in today's media landscape, news is delivered in multiple ways, both directly and indirectly. Direct: Think?email alerts, a news outlet's website, print?publications,?and television and radio broadcasts and podcasts. Indirect: Homepages that aggregate news from many sources,?Facebook, X, and other social media channels that distribute news, not create it.?

The net effect??The innocent souls seated behind their?screens seeking enlightenment find themselves nearly mortally wounded?by?the deluge of?information. Too weak to concern themselves about the source of the news, all they can hope for is to make it out alive.

So naturally, under these conditions, no one counts how many breaking news stories are coming from individual news outlets or how often. The funny thing is, that as much as the digital age makes it possible for news outlets to hide their sins, it also shines light on their weaknesses.?

A well-managed newsroom stands at the ready, knowing it needs to spring into action when a story starts to break. Key players step up to cover the story; schedules are modified to be able to produce the breaking along with the necessary and the mundane; editors?begin getting antsy waiting on copy to question and approve, legal is on alert,?and newsies from different areas? -- who don't necessarily work together at any other time??-- adopt the team approach. They'll pitch in to verify facts, find sources, and GrubHub the pizzas.

For all of this to work, we take two things for granted. One?is that the newsroom possesses the journalism training it needs to get the job done, and two is the management's ability to get everyone to play nice inside the sandbox.

As you can see, there's a lot of moving pieces. There's also no number large enough to describe how many things can go wrong in covering breaking news.?You may have noticed even the venerable New York Times is feeling it of late. The fact they're being transparent is a positive. The fact they need to be transparent reveals more significant concerns, including?their credibility and what is happening inside the newsroom that is compromising that credibility.

Interestingly, smaller newsrooms often handle breaking news more efficiently than bigger outlets -- fewer moving pieces lends itself to a more streamlined approach and a faster turnaround.?

In what's become relatively commonplace in recent history is a movement for news outlets to abandon covering breaking news. Either they can't do it well, for many reasons listed above, or the staff is so burned out they've convinced themselves there are better ways to serve their audience.

While each of these arguments has its strengths, there's?an unfortunate correlation to this situation, and it's this: The less breaking news produced, the more broken the news outlet. If left as is, the likely outcome?is unsustainability. The New York Times will survive, but the future is most challenging for the smaller outlets that tend to be local.??

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