Time to think about time

I’ve been thinking about time as a factor in newspaper sustainability lately, because most of the country newspapers I am focusing on have long histories stretching back more than 100 years.

The concept of temporality, or our relationship with time, has traditionally been thought of as the linear progression of past, present and future. Taking this view, it is safe to say that journalism is rooted in the present part of that timeline. It covers the here and now, reports the latest happenings, is a ‘record of the present’ (Zelizer, 2018, p115). And this is even more amplified in a digital space, where immediacy appears to be the mantra of online news. It strives to be the latest, most up-to-date, breaking news. ‘Live now’, ‘just breaking’, ‘moments ago’, ‘today’ – these are the time markers of online news delivery. While broadcast news has long lived in this immediate space, it is a newer concept for newspapers, which traditionally reported news in timeframes of ‘yesterday’ or ‘this week’. Now they publish online too, their temporality is more ‘now’ than ever before.

With news production and news consumption so linked to time and the here-and-now, Zelizer (2018) argues for journalism scholars to also train their focus on time, to put temporality at the foreground of their studies to better understand news. However, she warns against a narrow temporal focus that gets fixated on ‘now-ness’ or immediacy (Sheller, 2015, p24 in Zelizer, 2018, p113). Journalism scholars need to move beyond considering time simply and exclusively as speed, a practice she describes as a ‘unidimensional’ approach to the issue of temporality in news (2018, p113). She laments that in recent times, speed has become a ‘stand-in’ for time and suggests there is a need for a more nuanced approach that takes full advantage of multiple temporalities that allow researchers to not just look at the here-and-now but to also look forward, sideway and backward (Zelizer, 2018, p113).

Calrson and Lewis (2019) have taken up this call by suggesting a temporal reflexivity lens for journalism studies. This approach emphasises and elevates exploration of the past and suggests that history could hold answers to present questions. At its core, temporal reflexivity allows scholars to draw on ‘lessons of the past to adapt to changes in the present and future’ (Carlson and Lewis, 2019, p644). Importantly, for a study such as mine that focuses on sustainability, a temporal reflexivity lens provides a focus away from the current academic inclination to research what is changing, new, different and innovative in journalism and instead pay attention to what isn’t changing. This will help reveal what is enduring and what has stood the test of time amid the changing landscape of local journalism. In this sense, these scholars are warning researchers not to become ahistoric - indifferent to tradition and without concern for the past - as they argue there is much to be learned from looking back.

Matthews and Hodgon (2021) would agree that this is especially true for local journalism, where they suggest there are many lessons that can be learned from history. They argue that we need to ‘bring ‘thinking through history’ to the contemporary predicament facing the local and regional newspaper’ (2021, p127). A look back through history will show that, in the UK at least, a discourse of decline has hung over the local press for almost a century, that newspapers have long faced challenges but they have found ways to survive. This mirrors the history of Australia’s local newspaper industry, where a struggle for survival and the overcoming of challenges has been present from the beginning (Kirkpatrick, 1996).

It is tempting to compare the health of today’s local newspaper industry with its heyday of the later 20th century when advertising revenue flowed freely and there was little competition. But that era is just one part of the long timeline of Australia’s local journalism industry and it could be more beneficial to look further back through the decades. Comparing today’s local newspaper landscape to that of the industry’s beginnings potentially reveals more similarities than differences. As historian Rod Kirkpatrick points out, the beginnings of Australia’s newspaper industry were not much more than a scramble littered with failures (Kirkpatrick, 1996). In the second half of the 1800s, there were plenty of newspapers that only lasted a few years, or even a few months. Those newspapers that avoided the high ‘infant mortality rate’ to go on to survive for decades did so through persistence and commitment (Kirkpatrick, 1996). They rose to the challenge of competition from a new masthead in the region by increasing the frequency of their publication, enlarging it or upgrading their printing equipment, and they provided a consistent voice for their communities via long-serving editors or proprietors (Kirkpatrick, 1996 and 1995). Through a temporal reflexivity lens, these are lessons from history that could inform local journalism’s present - and its future - and be especially relevant when it comes to exploring notions of sustainability.

It could be, as Zelizer (2018) suggests, that journalism scholars don’t want to look forward as they might not like what they see, but the here-and-now may not be the place that provides a solution to that problem. Instead, the past could be the best place to mine for answers to journalism’s future.