There the life span of a news item is reckoned to be about three minutes. So great is the pressure of incoming information, that all except the most important items have to make way for new items queuing up behind them. They enjoy some 200 seconds of media limelight and then they are gone. We are drowning in a sea of information so deep that the richer and busier of us are prepared to pay to avoid it. The Week undertakes to read all the newspapers and magazines on its readers behalf, decide what is important, then cut it down to manageable lengths.
Nothing is sacred.
Everything goes through this process. Readers buy it to avoid reading newspapers or watching TV news and yet to feel that they know what is going on in the world. Of course, some of them still watch TV and read the occasional newspaper but their initial loyalty is to The Week. Journalists realise this and this is what is behind the desperate search to offer readers something else to compensate for it, the search for the magic formula that will bring readers flooding back, a return to the good old days when information was scarce and news was king. I suspect that this is true because I have yet to meet anyone who will admit to reading every section of the increasingly large Saturday newspapers.