The clock shapes the story

A 300-page report comes out at four in the afternoon. The six o'clock news gives it fifty seconds. The time a story must be finished by is called its deadline. Here the deadline is two hours away. Somebody has to turn 300 pages into fifty seconds by then.

Nobody reads the report. The people who wrote it knew that. Their press office wrote a two-page version and sent it out with the report. That is called a press release. The fifty seconds at six is the press release, read aloud, over pictures of the building where it was launched.

The report lands at four. The news is at six. Where do the fifty seconds come from?

• The whole report, read fast.
• The press release, because that is what two hours can read.
• The reporter's own weeks of research.

Suppose the reporter tried anyway. A page a minute is fast reading. Two hours is 120 minutes. And in those two hours the reporter also has to film, phone and write. So even the best case leaves most of the report unread by the person telling you about it.

Three hundred pages. Two hours. A page a minute, with nothing else to do. How many pages get read?

Time changes something else too. In the first hour a reporter can only repeat what people claimed. Nobody has had time to check. By a week, some claims have been checked and some have fallen apart. The story gets truer, not longer.

The same story, given more time. Change the gap between the event and the deadline.

Move the control.

A fifty-second news item, split by what it spends its seconds on. Tap the part that would tell a viewer how SURE the big number is.

Tap the part of the picture that answers it.

Two hours is fixed. The document is not. A short report can be mostly read. A long one cannot. So the bigger the document, the bigger the share of the story that comes from the two pages the authors wrote about themselves.

The numbers are made up: a page a minute, an eight-hour day. Set how long the document is, and how long the newsroom has.

Move both controls.

Which of these get done by a six o'clock deadline, and which take a week?

One card at a time. Tap the pile it belongs to.

Six months later a researcher reads the whole report. The big number was the top of a wide range. Where does that finding go?

• A magazine for researchers, or a paragraph on page twelve. The fifty seconds are never re-run.
• A correction on the six o'clock news.
• Nowhere. It is old news.