ABSTRACT
Traditionally, news has always been subject to the pressures of time and space. Today’s news is tomorrow’s proverbial ‘fish and chip paper’ – news is required to be ‘new’; stories ‘have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don’t catch fire in that 24 hours, there’s no second chance’ (Rosen, 2004). At the same time, part of the craft of journalism in the twentieth century has been the ability to distil a complex story into a particular word count or time slot, while a talent of editors is their judgement in allocating space based on the pressures of the day’s competing stories.
