psmith, journalist

The UK is suffering a spot of bad weather. But if you want to know about it, you’re not going to wait for tomorrow’s paper. Are you?

The poor weather, which really has shut down swathes of the UK, hits home that the most important trend in news media is and has been for a long time, real-time news and information.

Newspaper bosses – and particularly magazine editors – like to stress the importance of print in providing long-form analysis, comment and context for readers. But when people really want to know something,  like whether their kids’ school is open or if the 8:10 to Liverpool Street is running, will they be content to find it out in 12/24 hours’ time, no matter how clever the writing?

Roy Greenslade highlights that all national newspapers could do was predict what was going to happen in the next few hours after going to print late last night (or very early this morning). He writes of his experience as a sub-editor handling snow stories at the Daily Mail’s Manchester office in the 1960s and says:

I see from today’s papers that technological change, and the passing of 42 years, hasn’t changed the way we cover the weather, nor, of course, the clichés we employ.

As for online? You get real-time travel news, real-time weather maps, user-generated real-time maps (and even iPhone apps). You get what’s relevant to you, only. Thanks to Twitter search, you can pretty much find out the conditions on your street without even looking out of the window.

As you would expect by now, regional papers are doing a good job of providing minute-by-minute updates: to name just a few, Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, the Bournemouth Echo and The News, Portsmouth are all using Cover it Live or something similar to keep readers up to date. (A notable absentee from the real-time reporting club is the Evening Standard which has still to significantly invest online since Lebedev’s buy-out, as I’ve said before).

CIL isn’t the best publishing tool ever, but I’d choose it over waiting for the next point at which it’s convenient for a 150-year-old industrial printing process to swing into action. Incidentally, it’s also only a matter of time before some paper idiotically says the snow proves that global warming is a myth.

It’s not just news media that consumers expect to see NOW:

• Music: Why trudge through the snow to physically obtain a new album as a CD when it’s on iTunes, Spotify, We7, Orange Music, etc… and often cheaper? (That’s assuming you’re paying for the darn thing and not stealing it via BitTorrent, of course…)

• Games: Same thing: what’s the point in physical (delayed) distribution when Steam can offers games via download in a matter of minutes and lets you play them on any machine?

• Sport: England are playing South Africa at cricket (and losing) – you can get witty, entertaining over-by-over text coverage from the Guardian and the BBC and listen to live Test Match Special commentary at the same time.

Anything that isn’t real-time is in danger of becoming aged news, and no one wants that.

Perhaps the NOW factor of news and information is something that people may even pay for…