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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.
You'd have to create an artificial metric for the importance of a news item, then measure for how many weeks it was front page news in a basket of prominent newspapers, then how long it was a prominent feature item, and how long until it disappeared entirely. How long did the Ukraine war stay on the front page every day in the WSJ and NYT and LA Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, vs how long did the Yugoslav wars stay on the front page. Various Israeli-Palestinian crises probably provide a relatively 1:1 comparison, as would mass shootings, or sex scandals.
But I suspect you wouldn't see stories stick around all that much longer. Rather, I think this perception might be the result of the multiplicity of content outlets that can be labeled "news" today. There's a long tail of websites putting out content every day, posting something, trying to get views. As a result there are always going to be dead-enders pursuing stories that have long dropped out of the mainstream news outlets.
There's also fewer actual reporters, fewer gumshoes knocking on doors and calling people on the phone and going to public meetings and digging into old files chasing actual stories. From the Times on down but especially below, newsrooms have died. Reporting new stories requires actual reporting, commenting on and remixing and reiterating old stories doesn't.
So you have content clickbait farms like Slate and Jezebel and TheAmericanConservative and a hundred websites that are even lower tier. And they've all got a dozen or more writers, and one of them might just have a hobby horse that he keeps putting out a shitty little article about every week or so, and that's a constant drumbeat of stuff about something everyone else has given up on.
So take a current Current Thing. The Kendrick Lamar vs Drake Rap Beef, and the associated accusations that Drake is a creep/pedo. Right now it's popular and fun, everyone is talking about it, the Dodgers are playing Not Like Us during batting practice, somebody shot at Drake's house, but two weeks from now it'll probably be out of the news. But you might have one writer who stays on the Drake is a Freaky Ass Nigga' beat, and just from sheer multiplicity of writers you can keep posting the same story over and over again, and it might feel like it stays "in the news" longer.
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