Breaking News Online: How news stories are updated and maintained around-the-clock

This article examines the consequences of “around-the-clock” news cycles online for the product of news. It argues that as a result of increased emphasis on continuous deadlines, the “news story” is diversified into a fluid, always updated/corrected product challenging existing notions of news as a set piece of work. In this context, “time” becomes an even more important factor for news production and blurs further pre-existing news formats. The “continuously updated news story” can change many times during the day and challenges the idea of news as the finished product of journalistic work. This research studies six UK news websites and monitors how specific news stories are broken and updated during the course of a day. It specifically focuses on the frequency of updates, the amount and type of information added as well as their sources in order to investigate patterns of news updating in each organisation. The patterns of news updating that emerge suggest that we need to rethink the “news story” as a fixed entity which has been associated with the distinct news cycles of traditional media. Although the daily cycles are not completely abolished, the news stories are rarely finalised.