Do Blogs Have A Trash Day?

March 25th, 2008

1 comment

By: Daniel Dore

“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc”

Anyone that has had the pleasure of speaking to me for me than 15 minutes has probably heard me mention my love of “The West Wing”

There’s a fantastic episode in the first season called “Take out the Trash Day”, in which White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman is explaining to his assistant, Donna, why a large number of stories are being released to the press on a Friday:

Donna: Why do you do it on Friday?
Josh: Because no one reads the paper on Saturday.

Further banter in this conversation reveals more information – if a newspaper has a certain section of a page earmarked for White House news, and there’s 10 different stories in that space, then each unsavory story is 1/10^th the size of a “normal” story (it’s no wonder Donna remarks “You guys are real populists, aren’t you?”).

While I could chalk this up to Aaron Sorkin’s vivid imagination, there seems to be a morsel of truth to it. News released on Friday will be in the Saturday news cycle, typically the day with the lowest newspaper circulation and the lowest rating for news (which is why news programs have “weekend anchors” who are typically not on the billboards) and will be forgotten by the time the Sunday talk shows introduce new topics.

Upon watching this episode for the 25^th time I wondered if this concept will exist in 10 years (”Trash Day”, not The West Wing). As more and more mediums move online, the calendar will seemingly play a smaller role in determining the life cycle of a story. There’s no need to rummage through a pile of newspapers or catch a news report at the right time; all one needs to do is search a news site or blog for any story under the sun from any date and instantly catch up with the cultural zeitgeist (or find out what that “Bradley Pitt” fellow is up to).

Of course, this also means that bloggers can’t take a day off and throw out their sub-par stories; while they may publish it on a Saturday with the mainstream media’s “trash”, it’s instantly accessible on any day after that for any reader, wanderer, or searcher to find. It can also depend on the reading rhythms of a blogger’s audience; with RSS readers becoming more and more mainstream, you can go away for a few days and catch up on your favorite sites in 15 minutes, (which is more than I can say for that stack of newspapers that piled up while you and the family were at the Grand Canyon - are you really going to read them all?) and feel like you missed nothing of consequence.

Am I off-base? Can bloggers dump stories in the trash, or are we truly in the midst of a 24-7 news cycle?

-Written by Daniel Dore, Sales Support Engineer/Deputy Chief of Staff

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One Response to “Do Blogs Have A Trash Day?”

Do Blogs Have A Trash Day? Says:
March 25th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
[...] wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThere’sa fantastic episode in the first season called “Take out the Trash Day”, in which White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman is explaining to his assistant, Donna, why a large number of stories are being released to the press … [...]