This essay continues on some of the themes outlined in the "moving into the instant" piece.  Today we saw the announcement that fairfax was closing the Independent and moving its reporting staff to Business day. Its online section of Stuff.co.nz devoted to business news. It was reported in reseller news and CIO. This is an interesting development, it would be nice to know the full story here. However if we take things on face value it appears that the online appetite for business news in growing and that print is withering away. Part of the reason is that business people want daily or even hourly updates. So we are moving from a weekly to a daily news cycle.

News cycle length is showing an obvious trend to shorter and shorter cycles. While Radio previously had the short news cycle to themselves maybe 24 hr news TV had some of this market. The web and especially the move to mobile internet is going to act to shorten the news cycle in news media.

Twitter in particular and social media in general typify this move. Most of the news is meta news it is news that there is some news. Frequently a link with some information about the link and why it might interest us. Some times it may be gossip or other genuine news.  What is news, is obviously defined by the social group so each network will treat news differently. Another way of putting this is that it is news by word of mouth i.e. gossip or punditry (like this).

It will be interesting to see how this affects the news media. Short cycles have one obvious benefit, you get to learn fast. Like bacteria in a petri dish, dividing every 20 mins there is rapid selection for success. Watch what happens and how people modify their behaviour.

In short cycle news the is obviously less time to worry about things, l guess, like conventional journalistic obsessions. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Already we see in twitter style patterns, short hand and tags evolving to increase the information density of tweets.

This move into the instant raises all kinds of problems for the public relations industry. In the past a new item was published or broadcast. Every one saw the same thing and responded as they saw fit, then all was quite till the next round of the cycle. I hear from some of my contacts that now they face constant engagement. The short cycle news is always updating and the value and state to any given piece of the news is changing through the day. As a story gets comments or a tweet gets re-tweeted. There is not a point in the day that you can say here's are clips this is where we are.

This constant engagement requires a different kind of reporting. There is no close of play the ball is always in play. We need to look at different ways to measure media.

Metadata  about news is used to measure the potential impact of a news story.

Static vs Dynamic Metadata

In clipping services often the client is  supplied with metadata about a clip. This is the data about the news source things like column cm, circulation, publication frequency etc.  This  I call Static Metadata. It does not really change much once you get the clip ( the circulation figures may change a bit)

In short cycle news we need Dynamic Metadata. This is information about the clip that is changing all the time. You Tube now does this very well showing information about how many views each clip has had and how it is trending. This is very important and may have changed significantly in a week or a months time. Dynamic metadata is hard to get your hands on. News papers don't put hits data on their page. This may have to change as they move more to short cycle news. We can gather some Dynamic metadata from other sources like google and twitter about followers search results etc. As time goes on I think the Dynamic metadata will play an increasingly dominant role in media measurement.

We have started experimenting with collecting dynamic metadata.