In the jargon of yesteryear’s journalism, the “cold cuts” were outdated news that the majority of newspaper readers, as well as radio and TV consumers, were supposed to already know about.
Being typified like this, it was just like a sin for a newspapers company to publish such things as fresh news when other media had already done it, conveniently.
The application of this sieve caused many news to have an early expiration date, at least at the level of the written press, which really isn’t the case these days.
On the contrary, what’s encouraged and predominates is the recycling of news, that is, their multiple use in different formats based on the multimedia of this time.
News are the input. Recycling is the variety of ways to process, format, dress and disseminate them. In the LISTIN DIARIO, for example, a compact news item, formed by only text, is fragmented into several portions on the digital version.
The digital platform, in turn, can add audiovisual content or photos that correspond to the purpose of the news. Also, speeches under the podcast format, that is, with possible background music and sound effects, or under the straightforward and classical model of just narrating.
So, now the news can be reproduced on many different social media platforms with different aural or visual resources, making its lifespan a lot longer than in the printed format of a newspaper.
News found on the newspapers are extremely short-lived because they just die as soon as the reader consumes it. For this reason, the evening editors of the newspapers of yesteryear were careful not to publish the “cold cuts” during the afternoon or the next day’s edition.
That also happened with the morning of the next day in respect to the publications that, at the time, were new or exclusive to the evenings of the day before, so as not to revive “cold cuts”.
That’s gone down in history. Nowadays, the news can age better because they simply have “longer legs” to run farther than before. This is thanks to the recycling model that prevails in the modern informative ecosystem of today.
- Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 