Deadline II
In this regular series, frieze d/e asks artists, curators and writers to think about the meaning and impact of a word – however dreaded it may be .
In this regular series, frieze d/e asks artists, curators and writers to think about the meaning and impact of a word – however dreaded it may be .
In the world of newspapers and journalism, the deadline has a mythical status. Up to a particular time, (almost) anything is possible: new information may be obtained; final adjustments can be made to the front-page headline. The deadline is an ordering principle imposed on printed products. But it is also a myth because journalism doesn’t work like that, with writers getting down to work like hamsters in a wheel at ten in the morning and submitting their copy five minutes before the deadline. That’s not the way it is.
With the advent of online journalism, one might have thought that deadlines had become a thing of the past because the Internet facilitates a new era of journalism: the infinite technical reproducibility of information and clever ideas – the main currencies of journalism. But this, too, is a myth. Even online journalism needs deadlines – they are self-imposed.
In the online world, various types of deadline have emerged to do justice to different journalistic forms. Basically, a piece of news should appear on the website the second it becomes known. The Internet is a direct news medium. But even the ensuing piece of analysis or commentary on a news story cannot be published at 2 am – because most readers are asleep. Deadlines are thus tailored closer to the readership. They can even tell us what the population is up to at any given moment.
People on their way to work in the morning are looking at their mobile devices, hence the 7am deadline: by then, if possible, the website needs to have a new lead story; because, to adapt an old newspaper adage, nothing is older than yesterday’s homepage. Later, people are taking their lunch break, hence the primetime deadline. Between 10am and 2pm. That’s when stories receive the greatest amount of attention.
But the most interesting type of deadline is what might be termed a ‘countdown deadline’, counting off the minutes between an important event and its dissemination as news. A typical breaking news item from an agency might read: ‘female employee at jobcentre in Neuss dies in knife attack.’ The clock starts ticking. Every news website wants to be the first to post the story. If it’s not online after 15 minutes, it still gets posted, but not as breaking news, because the countdown is over. And once this deadline has passed, the next one is already looming – for a correspondent’s report on the knife attack at the jobcentre.
So the deadline is not a thing of the past; almost every second can become one.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
