Accuracy and Timeliness in Journalism: Studying the Breaking News Routines of Journalists in the 24-hour News Environment

In the aftermath of major news events in recent years, the journalism coverage of those events has become its own topic of conversation. Much of the reason for this is that major mistakes have been made by journalists from news outlets across the media spectrum - from small-time bloggers to news juggernauts like CNN. The popular press analyses have pointed to the temporal crush that journalists face in the 24-hour breaking news environment as a key catalyst for these mistakes. To study the intersection of accuracy and timeliness in the current news environment, I interviewed nine journalists from a wide variety of media outlets. These interviews were designed to explore the routines of journalists as they strive to both defeat their competitors by breaking news first and stay accurate in their reporting. Two major themes emerged from these interviews - that my participants are deluged in details and that they look to externalize blame for the problems facing modern journalists. To counteract these issues, I propose that journalists raise their routines to awareness and openly discuss them on a daily basis so that they avoid routines that hinder their ability to accurately disseminate the news.