What Were You Synching? An Ethnographic Study of News Scheduling at a Digital First Legacy Newspaper

Abstract

Digital first strategies at newspapers raise complex questions of temporality and scheduling. Yet there is a lack of ethnographic accounts for web-to-print newsmaking. While research has long been concerned with time in analog newspaper production, and online news time has mostly been studied through the prism of immediacy, almost nothing is known about dual-platform workflows. What happens to temporalities when web and print production factors and logics collide? Ethnographic research at legacy Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps provides a novel insight. Using a newsmaking reconstruction approach, we conducted an in-depth case study of a single day’s news production with a view to understanding publication times and scheduling. Despite their much-publicized shift to web-to-print production, the impetus for producing stories largely remained subordinate to filling the print pages via backwards scheduling. Tools, meetings and temporal labels defined broad categories of stories that reflected temporal publication objectives and associated production requirements. Many outside forces restricted scheduling options, while publication frequency invariably accelerated late in the day. When publication times were not imposed by external forces, the logics key newsworkers applied to scheduling involved smoothing the output curve, building sequences with variation in form and content, and catering to reader habits and preferences.