We’d Have No Concept Of ‘News’ Without Our Particular Ideas About Time

“While we frequently wring our hands about the fact that news is in ‘crisis’, we rarely discuss what news actually is. Much like history, news is fundamentally a way of imposing order on the messy totality of what’s going on around us. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘news’ as ‘newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events’. Or, in [historian Robert] Darnton’s words, news is ‘stories about what happened’. What we consider to be news is therefore intimately connected to our perception of time.”