News must be simultaneously new and comparable to prior events

Evidence

Gitlin eventually came to some conclusions about the way mass media worked and what constituted a story for the modern press. To qualify, the phenomenon at hand would have to be new—it was called the “news” after all—and it would have to arrive with intensity and surprise the audience. The media would inevitably choose from a huge assortment of existing facts and illuminate just one of many truths. Furthermore, any story had to be readily comprehensible to the general public. It had to fit into preexisting categories and correspond to the range of things that people already knew about and considered possible. In other words, it must be comparable to something that has already happened. It must be “old,” at the same time. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 76

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Media coverage can create organizations that outstrip their actual membership — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 73; Instantaneous publication is a recent expectation, not a technical constraint. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 349; News cannot picture reality but only signal that something is happening — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 358 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• An event needs change over time to become real in the present #expands (0.85) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 114
• News cannot picture reality but only signal that something is happening #complicates (0.80) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 358
• The newspaper’s dateline grounds its disparate stories in shared homogeneous time #exemplifies (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 111