Long Live Dead News
The news media’s obsession with ‘Live’ news shouldn’t distract us from the truths that require sustained attention.
August 20, 2024
Goodbye Developing, Happening Now, and Latest. Even Breaking’s 30-year reign atop the urgency usage charts is precarious.
Live news lives everywhere this year, its 24/7 flashing-red updates transforming mundane stories into minute-by-minute feeds of unfettered information. But is it necessary? I’m here to argue that Live’s growth is the wrong approach to news and distracts us readers from understanding the truth.
Just consider:
At a time when political candidates, rogue actors, and hostile foreign governments are “flooding the zone with shit” to disrupt global elections, some publishers are helping muddy the waters by creating more noise.
At a time when AI companies are ripping apart and reassembling articles, some publishers believe disaggregating their own storytelling into smaller and incoherent bits is a winning strategy.
And at a time when more people are tuning out from the news because it’s too overwhelming, some publishers are adding more anxiety to the news cycle, regardless of whether the news warrants it.
“But Joe, Live generates clicks. And more clicks means readers reach our paywall faster.”
I understand the news media’s economics are scary, but publishers won’t beat TikTok or Netflix in a battle for human attention. Winning trust and subscribers comes from respecting attention, not diminishing it. Live’s collapsing of time doesn’t help.
Let me offer myself as a case study. Of the 2,416 news articles I read in 2024’s first six months, only four were Live stories. That’s 0.17% of my overall total. (Those are real statistics.) Seeing the word Live on a news story makes me less inclined to read it. This is a choice of both taste and principle: rejecting Live signals to publishers I don’t want my attention coerced.
I imagine others might feel the same.
Do some moments require Live news? Of course. Natural disasters, active shooters, and other time-sensitive, life-or-death events warrant Live coverage. A presidential assassination attempt or U.S. Capitol attack also make sense. I’m not opposed to Live when its necessary.
But Live is now Donald Trump saying he will have a press conference, building suspense for an event that shouldn’t be live itself. Live is J.D. Vance making dubious claims about Tim Walz’s military service without leaving time to verify the spin’s veracity. The list of people saying things in Live news is long.
Live’s problem is that its speed reduces journalism to stenography, forcing journalists to elevate noise into news to fill a newshole that doesn’t need to exist. Live disservices journalists who should have time to pursue truth, not spin. It disservices us readers who must learn how to better direct our attention. And it disservices those stories that have real urgency and require attention in the moment.
And that’s my main issue: Live’s scatterbrained approach is slowly training us humans to believe that what’s “live” only exists in the past few minutes, further collapsing our sense of time and alienating our rhythm with the natural world. Live’s focus on urgency and conflict ignores stories that exist in perpetuity but are always ‘live’. Because every story lives, changes, and dies in each moment. The question is whether we are given time to see the world that way.
Those stories that exist in perpetuity might be considered Dead in 2024’s Live news cycle. They’re slow moving and not that juicy. But that’s the news I want right now: the truths that come from sustained attention. To me, those Dead stories are the ones truly living.
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