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I have a schizo theory and no better place to put it.
The average length of time an item spends in the news cycle has changed. What used to last for 2-3 weeks, maybe a month now lasts for months on end, and potentially a year plus. Society's reaction to Covid is the obvious material cause. By shutting down large amounts of human activity, governments prevented newsworthy things from happening. Covid remained the default news item throughout most of 2020, being punctuated only by the Floyd slaying, which took up most of the summer then yielded to the US elections before running to Covid for the next year. However, since the winding down of restrictions in 2022, this pattern has not ceased. The news cycle since then has been dominated by the self inflicted Cost of Living crisis and more recently we are seeing fallout from the latest episode of the Israel and Palestine show, which took place back in October.
Why is this? My schizo theory is the that there are two contributing factors. First is that increased internet use during the lockdowns gave news outlets much needed traffic and analytics data to identify how people use their site and what they most interact with. Where news items might have been frontpage and then accessible under the relevant section of the site (ie, health, entertainment, economy, etc) now has been moved into its own standalone section accessible from anywhere on the site. Second is that habbits have been solidifed amongst the population where they now check the news with a much, much greater frequency than they used to, but also "follow" stories of a particular narrative over a long period of time.
I have no idea how you'd go about testing any of this.
My theory is that at any one time, there's one "primary" international news topic which dominates the Anglosphere discourse for months or years at a time. This topic is sometimes coupled with a "local" topic which only dominates the discourse in specific Anglosphere nations. In addition to the primary and local topic du jour, there are smaller secondary topics which take up a great number of column inches for a few weeks, but rarely longer than a fiscal quarter, and never threatening the status of the "primary" topic.
A history of international "current things" in Ireland:
A history of "local" topics which dominated the Irish discourse almost as much as the dominant topic du jour, but only locally (with some maybe getting a few write-ups in British outlets):
There was a period of several years where you never saw "Iran" in the news without it being followed by "-Contra."
There's one local example that sticks in my mind, even after all these years. Back in 1982, there was a rabies epidemic. For months, almost every day on the front page of the Fairfax Journal, there were stories about rabid animals (it was almost always raccoons for some reason) being found and euthanized.
Then a while later I realized I wasn't seeing those anymore.
But there was never any announcement of an end to the epidemic. For all I know, it might still be going on!
https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/usa/surveillance/wild_animals.html
It is! It got much worse, and now it's back down to 1982 levels.
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