NEWS TIME

The news is one kind of story, and time is a basic element of story. A feature of all kinds of stories is their chronological time structure: events tend to be told in the order in which they happened. Although when is one of the journalist's basic facts, news stories follow a radically different ordering. They begin generally with the most recent event and cycle back through earlier events, giving information in instalments. This makes news discourse uncohesive and difficult to understand. Modern news discourse has developed this time structure through a combination of the news values of recency and novelty, the journalistic practices of the deadline and the scoop, and technology which increasingly enables live coverage in 'real' time. One result is that news neglects the why and how because of its concept of when.