Abstract
‘Time affects the work of every institution, but few so substantially as the news media.’ This statement by political scientist Thomas Patterson (1998: 56) underscores the significance of time for understanding journalism and its challenges (see also Barnhurst, 2011). Concurrently, it exposes the prevailing view about the direction of the relationship between time and journalism. In scholarly, journalistic and popular discourse, time is commonly viewed as a factor that influences, shapes and constrains journalistic practice. From this perspective, journalists increasingly struggle to meet the demands of accelerating news cycles (Boyer, 2010; Klinenberg, 2005), while having to produce more news in less time (Boczkowski, 2010) and compete with online actors who have temporal advantages over traditional journalism. This news culture of immediacy and speed is situated within the broader temporal conditions of contemporary society, including the accelerated compression of time in post/late modernity (Harvey, 1989; Virilio, 2000), or what Douglas Rushkoff (2013) calls ‘Present Shock.’ Time pressures are also seen as undermining the ability of journalists to fulfill their societal roles (Patterson, 1998; Plasser, 2005; Rosenberg and Feldman, 2008). According to this view, the focus on an ever-more fleeting present and the need to produce news that meets the demands of accelerating news cycles lead to the production of news stories that are shortsighted, shallow and inadequately verified, and that reflect sudden events rather than enduring problems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Andrews, W.L. (ed.) (2003) Classic American Autobiographies. New York: Penguin Books.
Austin, J.L. (1962) How to do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Barnhurst, K.G. (2011) ‘The Problem of Modern Time in American Journalism,’ KronoScope, 11(1–2), 98–123.
Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bell, A. (1991) The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bell, A. (1995) ‘News Time,’ Time & Society, 4(3), 305–28.
Berkowitz, D. (2011) ‘Telling the Unknown Through the Familiar: Collective Memory as Journalistic Device in a Changing Media Environment,’ in M. Neiger, O. Meyers and E. Zandberg (eds) On Media Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 201–12.
Betancourt, I. (2010) Even Silence has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle. New York: Penguin Press.
Bird, S.E. and Dardenne, R.W. (1988) ‘Myth, Chronicle, and Story: Exploring the Narrative Qualities of News,’ in J.W. Carey (ed.) Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 67–86.
Boczkowski, P. (2010) News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boyer, D. (2010) ‘Making (Sense of) News in the Era of Digital Information,’ in S.E. Bird (ed.) The Anthropology of News & Journalism: Global Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 241–56.
Carey, J. (1989) Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Edy, J.A. (1999) ‘Journalistic Uses of Collective Memory,’ Journal of Communication, 49(2), 71–85.
Gonsalves, M., Howes, T. and Stansell, K., with Brozek, G. (2009) Out of Captivity: Surviving 1967 Days in the Colombian Jungle. New York: Harper Collins.
Grusin, R. (2010) Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Kampf, Z. (2013) ‘Mediated Performatives,’ in J.O. Östman and J. Verschueren (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kitch, C. (2002) ‘Anniversary Journalism, Collective Memory, and the Cultural Authority to Tell the Story of the American Past,’ Journal of Popular Culture, 36(1), 44–67.
Klinenberg, E. (2005) ‘Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597, 48–64.
Marvin, C. and Ingle, D.W. (1999) Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. New York: Cambridge University Press.
McDaniel, M.A. and Einstein, G.O. (2007) Prospective Memory: An Overview and Synthesis of an Emerging Field. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Meyers, O. (2007) ‘Memory in Journalism and the Memory of Journalism: Israeli Journalists and the Constructed Legacy of Haolam Hazeh,’ Journal of Communication, 57(4), 719–39.
Neiger, M. (2007) ‘Media Oracles: The Political Import and Cultural Significance of News Referring to the Future,’ Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 8(3), 326–38.
Oddo, J. (2013) ‘Precontextualization and the Rhetoric of Futurity: Foretelling Colin Powell’s UN address on NBC News,’ Discourse & Communication, 7(1), 25–53.
Patterson, T.E. (1998) ‘Time and News: The Media’s Limitations as an Instrument of Democracy,’ International Political Science Review, 19(1), 55–68.
Peri, Y. (1999) ‘The Media and Collective Memory of Yitzhak Rabin’s Remembrance,’ Journal of Communication, 49(3), 106–24
Plasser, F. (2005) ‘From Hard to Soft News Standards? How Political Journalists in Different Media Systems Evaluate the Shifting Quality of News,’ International Journal of Press/Politics, 10(2), 47–68.
Richardson, B. (2006) ‘Making Time: Narrative Temporality in Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory,’ Literature Compass, 3(3), 603–12.
Rimmon-Kenan, S. (2002) Narrative Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Robinson, S. (2009) ‘“We Were All There”: Remembering America in the Anniversary Coverage of Hurricane Katrina,’ Memory Studies, 2(2), 235–53.
Roeh, I. and Feldman, S. (1984) ‘The Rhetoric of Numbers in Front-Page Journalism: How Numbers Contribute to the Melodramatic in the Popular Press,’ Text, 4(4), 347–68.
Rohde, D. and Mulvihill, K. (2010) A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides. New York: Viking.
Rosenberg, H. and Feldman, C.S. (2008) No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle. New York: Continuum.
Rushkoff, D. (2013) Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin Group.
Sayre, G.M. (2000) ‘Introduction,’ in G.M. Sayre (ed.) American Captivity Narratives. New York: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 1–17.
Schudson, M. (1992) Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books.
Schudson, M. (2005) ‘Four Approaches to the Sociology of News,’ in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds) Mass Media and Society (4th edn). London: Hodder Arnold, pp. 172–97.
Schweizer, H. (2008) On Waiting. London and New York: Routledge.
Searle, J.R. (1979) Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (2008) ‘Fighting for the Story’s Life: Non-Closure in Journalistic Narrative,’ Journalism, 9(1), 31–51.
Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (2013a) ‘Bridging Collective Memories and Public Agendas: Toward a Theory of Mediated Prospective Memory,’ Communication Theory, 23(2), 91–111.
Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (2013b) ‘The Management of Visibility: Media Coverage of Kidnapping and Captivity Cases around the World,’ Media, Culture & Society, 35(7), 791–808.
Virilio, P. (2000) Polar Inertia, trans. P. Camiller. London: Sage.
Zelizer, B. (1992) Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Zelizer, B. (1998) Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Zerubavel, E. (1985) Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (2014). Counting Time: Journalism and the Temporal Resource. In: Zelizer, B., Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (eds) Journalism and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263940_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263940_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-26393-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26394-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)