Time has got to be the most valuable commodity that there is. With only so many minutes in a day, days in a year, and years in a lifetime, we seek to optimize our finite hours as best we can. Humanity has developed a number of methods to manage time, including creating mechanisms to measure it, and communication technologies to conquer it. Information sharing has always occurred among and between communities, but the rate of sharing has grown faster and faster thanks to developments like language, writing, printing, telegraphy, photography and radio, among others.

Serving this growth in information sharing has been a long tradition of journalism, in which private individuals and organizations would take it upon themselves to record events and facts for the purpose of sharing that information with the public via the contemporary communication technologies. Investigating and exposing stories of public interest is an important job of journalism, but another role that has traditionally been equally important has been to use its editorial judgment to function as a reputable agenda-setter in public discourse.

In our contemporary setting, the traditional media’s ability to set the agenda is diminishing, and nowhere does this seem more clear to me than in the lamentable over-extension of the definition of ‘breaking news’. Breaking news as we know it dates to the radio era, and was used sparingly – only when the significance of the story was such that it warranted interrupting the scheduled broadcast. One could convincingly argue that breaking news is platform neutral, and that news ‘breaks’ when it is first learned by a given individual, but I will stick with radio as the example of the first mass media communication technology to engage in the practice of delivering breaking news bulletins.

Today, however, news organizations have established channels of communication that are devoted to ‘breaking news’ – I receive ‘breaking news’ alerts by SMS from the likes of the New York Times and CNN, and of course Twitter has gained much notoriety for providing breaking news alerts. In this situation, the context of ‘breaking news’ transforms itself. It is no longer the late-arriving information that is of cardinal importance and must interrupt the scheduled broadcast. It is, instead, now merely the latest information that the editors think you should know, even if the information is not so significant that they would have interrupted an old-fashioned broadcast to share it.

One could argue that the questionable editorial judgment shown on these new “breaking news” feeds does not measure up to that of earlier generations of broadcasters, but I think that this misses the point. What is more significant is that Breaking News has come to be more about freshness than importance, and this reflects the way in which time has become of ever greater value in a communication paradigm where news travels across the globe in a keystroke. In a culture that values ‘newness’ over significance, then it will always be a race to be the first to publish – even if that often means racing to publish inane nonsense.