Last night, Tanner Friedman enjoyed a case study in the “24 Hour News Cycle.”
A client called me in the evening with a news story – not just an idea or tip – a bona fide story involving their business. It was 6:45 p.m.
At one time, someone in my position might have said “let’s talk in the morning and decide what to do.” But, because of the Internet, 24 hour all-news radio, beefed up morning television, a wire service bureau locally and newspaper journalists with home access to their newsrooms’ systems, we broke the story immediately.
By 8:15pm, a wire story was online. Early in the 9pm hour, multiple newspapers carried the story on their web site. At 9:30pm, our client was being interviewed on live radio. This morning, TV newscasts ran the story repeadtely and the daily newspapers had it prominently, in one case on the front page.
It doesn’t happen every day. But, news can be broken, strategically, at any hour of the day or night to tell stories and deliver messaging. It is another example of how news is changing, in this case positively.