That's the theory anyway, a theory that has been embraced by many of the big news websites in this country. Everything needs to be constantly updating, new stories have to be always going up, and that lead story needs to be changing all the time.
And they obviously do need to do this - a news website has to have all the latest breaking news, and needs to have new pretty things to look at all day long, or the mass audience is going to just drift away, looking for new novelty elsewhere.
But there is a real danger in getting up too much stuff, and overloading everybody by having way too much junk in the trunk.
The most obvious hindrance from this constantly-updating attitude is that a lot of the good stuff gets buried. Long, worthy pieces that go up first thing at 5am can be pushed out of the top stories list by the time some late-rising reporters get out of bed, and they get more than a little disgruntled when they find their hard-won stories have already been buried by editors who have been on the early shift for four hours, and is now beneath a story about Peter Burling eating a burrito.
It can avoid this ignominious fate by making an immediate impact on the numbers, and quickly gaining a noticeable audience, but no story has time to build, and can be flushed away as old news within a couple of hours. The internet is near infinite, but there is still only a finite amount of precious display space left for editorial content on a major news website, and no matter how important a story is, it can get pushed right down to the nether regions of the site, remarkably quickly.
It's a delicate balance for online news editors, who are pushed to grow numbers by any means necessary, but are also high-level users, constantly refreshing their home pages, and getting bored by seeing the same stuff so quickly, because that's all they are looking at all day. This is why stories get no time to build an audience, there's a constant flow of new stuff, and nowhere to put it all.
You particularly see this on the biggest news sites - Stuff and the NZ Herald pack their pages with new novelties, and are always updating, always pushing the unworthy further down the page into digital oblivion, replaced by the new thrill. TVNZ's entire internet concept is about the constantly updating log of stories, with fuck-all curation of the flow.
In this respect, the recent redesign of the Herald site has made it even more difficult, there are just far fewer stories at the top of the site when you go there, far fewer things to grab the immediate attention (including the loss of the 'latest news' ticker, which showed the site was alive and updating, while also giving unexpectedly popular stories a chance to get some hits). Especially if you're still going to it on the desktop, where the easy scrolling of the mobile phone just doesn't happen - it's the classic journalism lesson that if it's 'below the fold', it's not going to be read.
A lot of the smaller newsrooms in this country, including the Newshub, NBR and RNZ crews, have sites that don't churn through the day's events quite so fast, and give stories that might not generate a mass audience a bit of a profile. It's okay for stories to sit at the top of their pages for a few hours, and give everybody a chance to see them. It can certainly pay off - Newshub's sharp online presence was named the best news site at the recent Canons.
The world does feel like it's speeding up sometime, with a sheer deluge of news and information, but there are benefits to taking it a bit easier, and spacing things out a bit. Chasing the clicks just means an avalanche of content, and that smothers us all.
- Ron Troupe
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