The Life Cycle of News

The Life Cycle of News

Mangesh Karandikar Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Mumbai

This study was possible because of the patient hard work put in by my students, watching television channels daily and painstakingly jotting down the data.

Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Mangesh Karandikar, Asst. Professor, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Mumbai , 2nd floor, Health Centre Building, Vidyanagari, Kalina, Santacruz (East), Mumbai 400 098. E-mail: mangesh.karandikar@gmail.com

The Life Cycle of News

ABSTRACT: Giving credence to the contention that making news is business and that news is a product which is produced by the media organizations and sold over their media channels, this paper explores how news behaves as a product. Every product follows a life cycle, with stages of inception or introduction, growth, stability and decline. The revenue of a business organization depends greatly on how the product does in the growth phase and how stable it remains after attaining a certain period of growth. While developing a new product, it is necessary that it must be launched while the first product is in the growth phase, so that the new product too reaches the growth phase by the time the revenue from the first product is either in the stable phase, or has started declining. This enables the business organization to gain revenues at a steady pace. With media organizations now termed as business houses, news could be now termed as a product and should logically follow the Product Life Cycle. This research puts news into the product paradigm and explores its life cycle and tries to find the life-span of news purely from the marketing point of view. It also explores which kind of news product has a longer life cycle, and which type news product causes a decline of the previous news product. The study is exploratory, quantitative and method followed is that of content analysis.

The Life Cycle of News Introduction The worlds first 24 hour news channel - CNN was born in June 1980. With the tagline It is always primetime somewhere it took courage and vision of Ted Turner to launch this channel from a shopping mall in Atlanta. Since then, seemingly unrelated series of events and technological advances have changed the way media and entertainment industries operate and

how we, the people use media. Soon after CNN was launched in the USA, Samir Jain took over The Times of India, turned it into a brand and very quickly made it into a huge commercial success. Many loyal readers stopped subscribing to the Times of India, but in turn, The Times gained new consumers in form of fashion and lifestyle hungry young readers. The content for serious readers was relegated to a few sections of the newspaper. The indefatigable Khushwant Singh writes, The Times group has every reason to crow over its achievements. There are newspapers which enjoy more credibility and provide better reading. But the Times reigns supreme. The credit goes largely to Samir. He sensed that if print had to survive TV, it had to radically alter its content. Samir Jain (rightly?) concluded that editors were dispensable. From his great grandfather he has inherited the uncanny gift of making money: the Times has become a major money-spinner.1

Since the 1990s successive governments have chosen the path to economic liberalisation spawning an explosive growth of the media and entertainment sector. The industry has grown exponentially in terms of its reach as well as generating revenues. The Entertainment and Media Industry contributed more than Rs.28000 crore to the countrys economy in the year 2010 and the total output of the sector was more than Rs.92000 crore.2 With a growing trend of

1 2

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?220785 Acessed on May 11, 2011 http://www.pwc.com/en_IN/in/assets/pdfs/ficci-pwc-indian-entertainment-and-media-industry.pdf

The Life Cycle of News

regionalization, entry of newer players, consolidation and tactical mergers, digitalization and the convergence between entertainment and information, along with divergent consumer devices for accessing the content, the media industry is expected to grow by more than 14 percent every year.
India's growing media industry
Rs bn 2006 2007 2008 2009 CAGR 2010E 2011E 2012E 2013E 2014E CAGR

TV Print Radio Internet

183 139 6

211 160 7

241 172 8

257 175 8

12% 8% 10%

289 190 9

337 206 10

382 225 12

448 246 14

521 269 16 29

16% 9% 15% 27%

2 4 6 8 59% 11 15 18 23 Source: The Indian Media and Entertainment Industry, FICCI KPMG Report 2010

This calls for the content produced by the industry, whether it is a television serial, film, talk shows or even news, to be called as products and study them with media economics as a base.

In media economic terms, in terms of supply, there are more than 62000 newspapers printed in India and more than 500 television channels at present. The demand for regional media shows more growth than the English language media. Since electronic media production is capital intensive, finance becomes the most important barrier to entry in the field, though this has not been a hindrance to the number of television channels mushrooming all over the country. Since print production depends heavily on subsidized newsprint supply, the suppliers have more bargaining power. However, suppliers of electronic media have only medium bargaining power. The bargaining power of consumers in both, print and electronic media is relatively high. The main reason is that the consumer is now spoilt for choices of sources to get the content they desire. In the print sector, competition is very high in the regional press and the entertainment broadcasting channels.

The Life Cycle of News

From society driven, news media has morphed into a market driven entity and from being readers, we have become consumers of news media. The technological, tactical and strategic convergences in the media industry have enabled access to divergent sources of information to its consumers. With the latest phase of technological advances, the consumer has now also become a contributor of news and creator of content for media.

The Life Cycle of News Literature Review

With the exponential growth of the media industry, rapid advances in communication technology and the way news is gathered, selected, edited and disseminated has changed. This paper considers that media is business, and studies the content that the media produces as a commodity without getting into a debate on the ethics of journalism and journalistic quality.

News as a product In 1857-58 during the Third Great Awakening, newspapers like The Tribune and The Herald, accepted the concept of news as a product. Apart from regular subscription based clientele, more papers were sold by hawking them on streets by newsboys, earning the newspapers an extra profit. The newspapers were sold by printing and publishing content supporting the Protestant evangelist awakening which the middle class audience expected to read.3 This was one of the earliest examples of how news was used as a product to sell newspapers. These penny papers packaged news as a product, by shifting the focus of news to report on common people, sensationalizing the content of news and generally making newspapers more popular with the masses rather than the elite. The increasing volume sales enabled these newspapers to charge more for advertising, earning more profits. The New York Sun became one of the major news papers in America, using simple language and popular content.4 News was designed and packaged as a product to give the viewers what they wanted, in a more reader friendly format that had content that mirrored their lives. Ebelstein equates the newspaper to a news mall

Kathryn T. Long, "11 Turning Piety into Hard Cash: The Marketing of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism," God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790-1860, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 237,Questia, Web, 3 May 2011. 4 Teun A. Van Dijk, News as Discourse (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988) iii, Questia, Web, 3 May 2011

The Life Cycle of News where even a casual reader is able to buy something.5 The news is clearly designed as a

product on display. Franklin (1997) has coined the term newszak which he uses to characterize the growing tendency of journalists to replace hard news with soft news, which increasingly diminishes the intellectual involvement of the reader. He maintains that Newszak understands news as a product designed and processed for a particular market and delivered in snippets. The age group of 18 to 35 are of more particular interest to advertisers who aim for their eyeballs as they are yet to make their brand choices.6 Television news is often cited as using news as a product and a tool to promote commercial products by capitalist ideologies (Schiller, 1995). Television is used as a mesmerizing tool, converting the viewers into products which are then sold to the advertisers. (Smythe, 1981).7 Grabe mentions that in order to make news content more appealing, media organizations package the boring, unarousing content into a more appealing, arousing format. To perform the function of information dissemination in a democratic society, the news stories must be both credible and memorable, and that perhaps the titillating style of presentation in tabloids and tabloidized channels, are more attractive, catching attention of the audiences even for the relatively lackluster subjects like economics and international affairs.8

To fulfill the responsibility of reaching the masses and informing them about the affairs of the country the media has to first reach the masses to fulfill their responsibility in a democratic society. The masses, in turn should be willing to pay for the information they get through the

Alex S. Edelstein, Total Propaganda: From Mass Culture to Popular Culture(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997) 203, Questia, Web, 3 May 2011 6 Stuart Allan, News Culture, 2nd ed. (Maidenhead, England: Open University Press, 2004) iii, Questia, Web, 3 May 2011 7 Bernadette Casey, Neil Casey, Ben Calvert, Liam French, and Justin Lewis,Television Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2002) 129, Questia, Web, 3 May 2011 8 Maria Elizabeth Grabe, Shuhua Zhou, and Brooke Barnett, "Explicating Sensationalism in Television News: Content and the Bells and Whistles of Form," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 45.4 (2001), Questia, Web, 12 May 2011

The Life Cycle of News

print, broadcast or other visual media. In case of a market driven economy, it is imperative that the media industry would have to package their product in such a form that is acceptable to masses, whether it is through sensationalism or through cleverly packaged products which are bought by the audiences (Lavine & Wackman, 1988, p. 255).

News life cycle While searching for literature for news lifecycle, the researcher came across some studies of news on online media.

An article in Science Daily states, Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, postdoctoral researcher Jure Leskovec and graduate student Lars Backstrom tracked 1.6 million online news sites, including 20,000 mainstream media sites and a vast array of blogs, over the three-month period leading up to the 2008 presidential election -- a total of 90 million articles, one of the largest analyses anywhere of online news. They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a "heartbeat" pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth. Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer.9

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090713170759.htm Accessed on May 02, 2011

The Life Cycle of News

Top 50 threads in the news cycle with highest volume for the period Aug. 1 to Oct. 31, 2008. The total number of posts was constant through the period; peaks represent stories that took up the largest proportion of all posts at a given time. (Credit: Kleinberg group)

Thus, the media industry has to be studied not just from the journalistic and ideological point of view, but taking into consideration that the industry makes a substantial contribution to the countrys economy it must be studied with media economics as a starting point and that its content must be studied as products. Giving credence to the concept that media is business and that the content the industry produces are products this study tries to find if news as a product follows one of the basic tenets of a product in marketing terms, that of a product life cycle. Mike Ward contends that life-cycle of a news story has four stages: Preview, News event, Reaction and further development, Anniversary. However, he does not explore the concept of news life cycle from the marketing point of view.10 One of the best examples of a news life cycle can be found in Susan Muellers four stages of news. (Moeller, 1999)11. However, this excellent example of how news media treat news does not treat news in the news product sense.

10 11

Mike Ward, Journalism Online (Boston: Focal, 2001) 41, Questia, Web, 03 May 2011 Moeller, S. D. (1999). In Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York and London: Routledge .

The Life Cycle of News Product Life Cycle

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Philip Kotler, widely acclaimed as the marketing guru the world over has described the life cycle of a product from its inception to its decline. Kotler argues that just like any living being, a product too has a life cycle which has four stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

A representation of a typical Product Life Cycle Introduction: A period of slow sales growth as the product is introduced in the market. Profits are nonexistent in this stage because of the heavy expenses incurred with product introduction. Growth: Maturity: A period of rapid market acceptance and substantial profit improvement. A period of a slowdown in sales growth because the product has achieved acceptance by most potential buyers. Profits stabilize or decline because of increased competition. Decline: The period when sales show a downward drift and profits erode.12

While many products follow this life cycle, some do not. Some products have an extended life cycles stretching for years and even generations. If one considers newspapers as a product of
12

Marketing Management, The Millennium Edition, Philip Kotler, Prentice Hall of India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 2001, Page 303

The Life Cycle of News

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their respective organisations, several of them have been around for generations. Media products, especially television serials have enjoyed very long life cycles, eg., CID of Sony, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi on Star TV, Mahabharat and Ramayan, Hum Log, to name a few. Speaking in terms of media economics, many media products continue to generate revenues long after their initial launch. To cite an example, the film Lagaan first earned the producers revenue through theatrical release, then through DVD and VCD sales, later through selling broadcast rights and again by releasing The making of Lagaan. The film Sholay makes money whenever it is re-released. Even films that have lost money or that have bombed in box office manage to enjoy a rebirth in DVD and VCD sales. On television, serials keep generating revenues by re-runs on various channels and hence more life on air. Radio programmes like Binaca Geet Mala are legendary. Thus media products too have a life cycle.

Launching a new product The concept of product life cycle is useful in many ways for marketing organizations. While the first product is being launched and as the sales and profits grow, it is important that a new product has to be conceptualized and launched much before the first product reaches its maturity. This is especially important when the life of a product is short. If the new product is not launched before the first one reaches maturity, the company could face severe cash flow problems, as by the time the second product is launched, and reaches a growth stage which earns profits, the first product would have already begun its decline. The following diagrams illustrate this concept clearly:

The Life Cycle of News

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Launching a new product The timing of the launch of a new product is extremely crucial in the news market. In todays scenario of low attention spans and tough competition, it is imperative that a new breaking news is ready for broadcast before the existing one becomes stale and not newsworthy. This study will try to find out if news broadcasters follow this very basic principle of marketing.

Research Questions: This study seeks to answer the following research questions: R1. Does news as a product follow a similar life cycle like that of other marketable products? R2. Which kind of news has a longer product life cycle? R3. Which kind of news replaces the previous one?

The Life Cycle of News Methodology

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To study the news as a product, the researcher asked his students to watch news channels during their prime time over a period of 10 days, everyday. The headlines, along with the time at which they were presented were noted. Out of the channels watched, two news channels, CNNIBN and Headlines Today were selected for analysis purely on the basis of the quality of data collected and the number of news stories. CNN-IBN had the maximum number of news stories, followed by Headlines Today. Both are National Channels. The headlines were numbered and colour coded, and then mapped according to the time at which the stories were presented on air on each day. Those stories that were repeated over the period of data collection were colour coded using separate colours. Those news stories that were not repeated even once were marked as others and given a common grey colour. The mapping was done manually by colouring each cell with the designated coding and later connected to find if there was a life cycle to the story similar to the one for other marketable products. The following stories were found to be repeated and hence used for analysis:
CODE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 STORY Bandra Fire CWG Scam 2 G Scam CVC Controversy World Cup Japan Earthquake Libya DMK-Congress WB Elections COLOUR CODE

The Life Cycle of News

10 11 12 13 14 15 21 22 30 34 Radhika Murder Jaitapur Fake Pilot Scam Other WiliLeaks Hasan Ali Mulayam Singh / Sp Mercy Killing CJ Thomas Issue Dalai Lama

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The Life Cycle of News Discussion This researcher contends that while searching for literature for studies on a similar topic, none

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were found. All the studies on news media that the researcher came across were done by placing news in an ideological, sociological or journalistic paradigm. It is quite possible that such studies have been missed by oversight.

It is difficult to map the life of news in a manner that is done for other marketable products, mainly because the time of inception of the news story would be difficult to find. Many stories marked as others have a total life span of about one or two minutes. In life cycle terms, their life is extremely short and they are not repeated even once. However, it would be impossible to map the time from the inception of the story till the time it is taken off the air, unless access to the reporter who covered the story is available and provided that the reporter maintains records or is able to recall the time at which the story/lead was obtained. For shorter stories, thus, this method of study would be inconclusive except to note that from the time it goes on air to the time it is taken off air, the life of these news stories is not more than a minute.

For a television channel, business-wise, this method of producing news products with a very short life cycle could be a more logical, as it would allow the news channel to present more news stories in a shorter span of time. Usually, since news bulletins are 30 minutes in length, more shorter news stories make more sense than a few longer stories. However, some of the news stories did have longer life span and have been mapped for the two channels studied. The observations are as follows:

The Life Cycle of News Channel: CNN-IBN During the period of study (March 05 to March 19, 2011) , the channel ran the theme story of

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West Bengal election throughout the whole period. This story was almost like a foundation or a backup on top of which the newer stories were built. This is clear from the representation below

The other news stories that were shown on CNN-IBN during the period of study were:

DMK Congress Alliance

Libya

The Life Cycle of News

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Mulayam Singh SP

CVC Controversy

Mercy Killing

CWG Scam

CJ Thomas Issue and Radhika Murder Case

Hasan Ali Case

Adarsh Scam, Jaitapur, WikiLeaks, Face Pilots

Earthquake in Japan

The Life Cycle of News

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Story on DMK Congress alliance, Libya, Mulayam Singh and Samajwadi party, Mercy Killing issue and the CVC controversy were broadcast during the first part of the study period. Overlapping these were the stories on the CWG Scam, C J Thomas issue, Radhika Murder case, and the Hassan Ali case. Before these stories were taken off, the Fake pilots issue, Adarsh scam, Jaitapur and WikiLeaks took over, and then on, the Earthquake in Japan dominated all the news.

First part

Middle Period

Last part

Other stories

The Life Cycle of News

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All news stories (Orange represents all stories in the first part, light blue represents the middle part and green colour represents the stories broadcast in the final part of the study period. Red colour represents the Earthquake in Japan, shown separately. Grey colour represents the stories which were not repeated at all.

The other stories were strategically placed as fillers on all days by the channel. From the above diagrammatic representations, it is clear that the New Product Launch concept is used by CNNIBN for news that could have longer life cycles. The kind of stories that have a longer life cycle are about scams, political controversies and natural disasters. All the other news stories have extremely short life cycles, which had to be relegated to the others category.

The observations from the channel Headlines Today (May 11 to May 24, 2011), however are a little different. First, the number of stories covered during the period of study are comparatively lesser than that of CNN-IBN. Moreover, the number of stories with longer life cycles are quite lesser.

The Life Cycle of News Following are the observations from Headlines Today:

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CWG Scam

2G Scam

Fake Pilot Scam

Earthquake in Japan

World Cup

Other news stories

Fake Pilot Scam

Hasan Ali case, Libya, DMK-Congress Alliance, WikiLeaks

The Life Cycle of News

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During the period of study, the Cricket World Cup and Earthquake in Japan dominated the broadcast time, however, the earthquake story was suddenly cut off at the end of the study period and world cup dominated the air time. The Fake Pilot scam, Hasan Ali Case, Congress-DMK story and Wikileaks had slightly larger life span, followed by other news stories which were either not repeated, or had very short life spans. Since the number of stories with longer life span were lesser, it cannot be concluded that news on Headlines Today follows the concept of new product launches as in CNN-IBN.

Conclusion This study was not able to conclusively prove that every news product has a proper life cycle like the other commercial products in the market, mainly because it is difficult to obtain data about the time of conceptualization of each news story. However, stories that cover scandals, scams, political discontent, disasters do have a longer life span and their life can be plotted and studied. It can also be safely concluded that television channels launch a new news product well in advance before the interest in the existing news product wanes away. This is of utmost importance as television channels have to survive on TRP and viewership ratings to sell advertising time which provide the revenues to run the channel.

What type of new news product replaces the existing one? The types of news that is news worthy enough to have a longer life cycle are scandals, scams, natural disaster and political skirmishes and controversies. The new news that replaces the existing one also is of the same type.

The Life Cycle of News Scope for further studies

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This study is just a beginning made towards understanding the economics of the media industry and by no means an authoritative and exhaustive study. A more detailed study of various television channels including the regional channels will give a better understanding as to how the television industry treats the news product.

To understand how the media industry works and why it works the way it does, it is necessary to study the media using media economics. The media is always studied from a sociological, ideological and journalistic angle. However, it is time to recognize the economic importance of media and give more weightage to studies in media economics.

The Life Cycle of News References

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Allan, S. (2004). News Culture, 2nd ed. Questia, Web, 3 May 2011. Maidenhead, England: Open University Press. Bernadette Casey, N. C. (2002). Television Studies: The Key Concepts, 129, Questia, Web, 3 May 2011. London: Routledge. Dijk, A. V. (1988). News as Discourse Questia, Web, 3 May 2011. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Edelstein, A. S. (1997). Total Propaganda: From Mass Culture to Popular Culture, 203, Questia, Web, 3 May 2011. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997. Indian entertainment and media outlook 2010. (2010, July). Retrieved January 2011, from pwc.com: http://www.pwc.com/in/publications/indian_entertainment_media_outlook_2010.html Kotler, P. (2001). Marketing Management, The Millennium Edition, Page 303. New Delhi: Prentice Hall of India Pvt. Ltd. Long, K. T. (2002). 11 Turning Piety into Hard Cash: The Marketing of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism," God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790-1860, ed. Mark A. Noll, 237,Questia, Web, 3 May 2011. New York: Oxford University Press. Maria Elizabeth Grabe, S. Z. (2001). Explicating Sensationalism in Television News: Content and the Bells and Whistles of Form, Questia, Web, 12 May 2011. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media , 45.4. Moeller, S. D. (1999). In Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York and London: Routledge . Singh, K. (2003, July 21). Outlook India. Retrieved May 11, 2011, from http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?220785 Acessed on May 11, 2011: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?220785 Tracking the Life and Death of News. (2009, July 14). Retrieved May 11, 2011, from Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090713170759.htm Accessed on May 02, 2011 Ward, M. (2001). Journalism Online, 41, Questia, Web, 03 May 2011. Boston: Focal.