I’ve heard this buzzword many times recently. Don’t exactly know what it means. Any ideas?
AFAIK it’s basically the time between issues/broadcasts of a news program or periodical. Newspapers would have a 24hour cycle, Local news has a 6 hour or less cycle, etc.
(this is just an educated guess, journalism majors - straighten us out)
It refers to the deadlines for various news media. Generally, if something happens after 6 pm on the East Coast, it will fall out of the “News Cycle” for most people. The national news broadcasts will already be set and ready for broadcast at 6:30 or 7. Newspaper reporters covering certain beats (like the White House) may still be around, but their stories won’t appear until tomorrow.
On the weekend, the “news cycle” can be a bit longer because many fewer people will watch televised news on the weekend. People won’t pay attention to what happened on the weekend until Monday.
Although I work in print, Bob T’s observations on news cycles make sense to me, although we don’t use the term. We’re always bemoaining news events that happen just after we’ve gone to press.
A further note on deadlines. Anyone, such as politicians, wanting to guarantee same-day coverage on the national news in North America should time their event so that it is most likely to make the supper hour news in the time zone of the biggest TV viewing audience.
You want to aim for this news cycle…time your event so it can be on the supper time news. That story is then picked up on the late news and, if it is still useful, on the morning news as well. (One TV story I was recently follwoing led the supper news, was used again late and was broadcast early the next morning.)
In Canada, for example, if you’re trying for the national news, you usually have to have your event by, say 4 P.M. Toronto time by the latest. Unless it’s really really big news, your evening news event will have to wait until the next day, when it has newer news to compete with.
Scribe out of curiosity what term do you use? The only phase they used when I was in school was news cycle.
Oldmaid85 you have already been answered but let me chime in with a ‘me too.’ The media I have been involved with has always used the term to refer to their own news publication schedule. Even shows/publications that share resources will have their own cycle. So someone on the national evening news would have a cycle that ended at 4pm. The only thing that would be broadcast if it took place at say 4:15 is some major event such as an assasination of a world leader. Newspapers would have a different cycle usually some time in the early morning around 3-4am.
In Salt Lake City where I attended school the key point was 2pm. This was because one of the two major papers was an evening paper. In order to get on the local dinner broadcasts as well as both papers you had to finish whatever it was by then. So the local PR flacks refered to this 2pm to 2pm time as the local news cycle.
Sorry, I’ve been offline.
We don’t use the phrase “news cycle” as such, but we do observe that things are “good” or “bad for our deadlines”. This forces us sometimes to do preview stories (This conference is about to happen, and this is why it was newsworthy.) This sucks on toast, as you’d guess.
Another observation. Sometimes, goverments take advatntage of releasing things quietly late on Friday, especially really bad news, hiding it in a report or something. Prior provincial governments here used to do it fairly often, and our guys covering the legislature learned to watch for it. The idea, according to spin-meisters, is to make sure it misses the Friday news. They then hope that it becomes too stale to use by Monday.
Political columnists here know to watch for it. I’ve read a lot of interesting columns and stories based on stuff that was released late, causing the journalists to go “aha”.