24/7 or 16/6?

What’s the fascination with always-on rolling news?

There seems to be an assumption that when you launch a website based around news you immediately become a 24-hour channel constantly spewing out news breaks and updates to an audience of breathless insomniacs. Indeed, from what I read into the behaviour of some of the news websites I follow with my Google Reader, it seems many organisations go to great lengths to give the impression that they are a constantly manned media operation – while actually being anything but.

The truth is, of course, that they merely programme their CMS to release certain stories at predefined times, allowing their harassed news editors to get some well-earned sleep, and some breathing space before the onslaught of the next news day.

Does this matter?

Our approach for the new Post website aims to be both ambitious and pragmatic.

Ambitious in that our audience (being mostly business readers), will demand up-to-date and valuable information for their particular business sectors – at the time of day that they’re at work. This is a great opportunity for us, as we already have much embargoed information to hand from the early hours of the morning, but our print deadlines force us to hold it back to the next day. Now, we’ll be able to ‘flash’ the immediate news straight away, and add layers of information through the day as the story develops. This will require new approaches in the way we work, and new levels of collaboration between the print and multimedia desks, but certainly not the wholsale destruction of current processes.

As for pragmatism, I believe this is where we need to avoid the temptation to ‘break everything – now!’. The Post’s key journalistic quality is one of intelligent analysis and explanation of often very complex issues. Our readers would rather watch three or four key stories develop through the day – and, moreover, trust us to choose the right stories – than be bombarded with dozens and dozens of bitty one-fact newsbreaks. Sure, we’ll ensure there’s a constant supply of new copy into all the component channels of the site, but the main pages – the front and business in particular – will have to be as carefully crafted and managed as the front page of the newspaper.