The Deadline is now

The deadline isn’t next week, it isn’t tomorrow, and it isn’t even 5 o’clock. For the journalists of today the deadline is now.

This was the message in this week’s online journalism lecture endorsed by Adam Tinworth, Head of Blogging at Reed Business Information, Europe’s leading online and offline publisher.

Adam said that weekly news magazines don’t work anymore as news has to be instantly published in today’s modern world. Undoubtedly this is true. There still can be weekly news analysis magazines and print media still has a role to play in news telling and analysis, but it is the world wide web where news is now first broken. News today also doesn’t end when the article is published, it is constantly updated, re-examined and followed up. News stories aren’t finished they are simply developed.

I was doing work experience with a local newspaper, the Bath Chronicle in September 2007 when they changed from a daily to a weekly edition to cut back on costs. This made me realise how the stories and style of news reporting had to change and adapt to fit to this modern world and evidently so much more emphasis for breaking news went through the online site.

All of this led me to consider the British newspaper reporting on the American election last week. Ironically this came up in conversation with Peter Preston the ex-Guardian editor in a lecture later in the week where Peter was questioned about why some British papers had the election result by the morning and why others didn’t. We were told it was simply about editions as certain national newspapers managed to get the result in earlier editions than others. Yet it did make me wonder whether anyone in the UK read a British newspaper to find out the outcome of the election unlike maybe in the past. Surely it would be through the online and broadcasting channels that most people found out that Obama had won.

Certain sporting matches bring up these issues again for newspapers where decisions whether to include results or match reports in the first edition can depend on where and when they finished. Sports reporting in fact is one sphere of journalism where these wider changes can be noticed more than anywhere else.

Today sites like the BBC have minute-by-minute updates of all the football matches and you can have instant messages sent to your mobile phone.

We also have massively successful and exciting live sports programmes such as Sky's Gillette Soccer Saturday that have instant reaction, analysis, scores and information. Despite not actually showing any football coverage it remains one the most popular, distinguished and as you can see from this clip brilliantly funny sports programmes on television.

Then you also have Setanta’s 24 hour sports channel that is hugely popular online available through a stand alone player as both audio or video with constant rolling sports news, which is also on a digital television station.

Even ITV’s Formula One site is full of continuously updated news and video content with live streaming of races.

This trend has even reached more local stations and individual matches for example Steve Tucker from Wales Online blogged the whole Cardiff game at the weekend live.

Newspapers have to keep up with broadcasters and online stations with their own online coverage, as shown by the acclaimed Timesonline ‘news site of the year’, whose own sport coverage is pretty extensive and revolves around breaking stories, updates and scores.

So it seems if the news and sport isn't instantaneous, live, breaking or immediate, then the chances are that it is probably not news anymore.

Photos courtesy of JonHall: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ormondroyd/265542756/

and sunsetbeach: http://www.flickr.com/photos/veeg/64817511/