I SAW THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY [525]

ITV News, with newscaster Lucrezia Millarini

When I previously discussed how BBC radio had no news to broadcast on Good Friday 1930, I clarified how specific the circumstances were: allowed only to report from newspapers and news agencies, the public holiday meant no newspapers were published that day, no wire services were running, and no other news was physically reported in time.

 

Today we, the audience, are like the BBC were then, primed to be on tenterhooks. The gap in time between the reception and dissemination of information has almost entirely been closed. Continuous, unedited live audio and video from anywhere can instigated at a moment’s notice by most people, ready to be picked up by anyone else. 

 

All technological and practical constraints that shaped TV and radio news have been removed. Instead of five-minute summaries or half-hour bulletins, the news is as long as you want it to be. Therefore, only you can shape what those limits are.

 

Because I will look at my phone an untold number of times per day – I don’t wish to know that number either – I can call myself up to date with the news, having looked at various reputable resources through the day, from the BBC, various UK newspapers including “The Guardian” and “The Times”, and American sites like CNN, “The New Yorker”, “The Atlantic”, “The New Yorker” and “The New York Times”. For this reason, once I arrive home from work, the last thing I want to watch is more news – a quick cursory glance through the evening will confirm if anything else has happened outside of business hours.

 

Our family, however, continues a tradition of watching the news from ITV in the evening. A half-hour regional news magazine has been anchored at 6pm longer than I have been alive, but the national ITV Evening News has become so long that, as a family, we consciously break away from it to watch something else. ITV’s evening news originally preceded the original news for fifteen minutes until 1998, when it was decided to make it ITV’s main news of the day, doubling the length to give more time to each story. From March 2022, it doubled again to an hour, adding the occasional longer investigation, but having more stories overall. The consequence, for us at least, is fatigue – there are only so many ways you can hear how human beings can be killed. Fortunately, we are relieved when “The One Show” begins.

 

Replicating daytime radio, hourly daytime news and weather summaries began appearing in 1986 on BBC One, with ITV following two years later. Largely made redundant by TV news channels and the internet, mornings on UK television are filled with people talking about the news: BBC One has “Breakfast”, “Morning Live” and an hour-long lunchtime news; ITV has topical shows “Good Morning Britain”, “Lorraine”, “This Morning” and “Loose Women”; BBC Two rebroadcasts the corporation’s global news channel, plus “Politics Live”; and Channel 5 has a succession of discussion shows from 9.15am to 3pm. Everything is up for discussion from various commentators, some appearing multiple times across these shows, some becoming identified with certain shows, like Sonia Sodha and Nick Ferrari on “This Morning”, or Kevin Maguire and Andrew Pierce on “Good Morning Britain” – all of these people also have regular newspaper columns. If you think one show is going on about the same subject for too long, or you want to hear what someone else thinks about the same subject, you have a choice of viewing. Only “Breakfast” and “Good Morning Britain” maintain news bulletins separated from commentators. Meanwhile, Channel 4 broadcasts American sitcom repeats in the morning.

 

This cacophony of news commentary is what led me to cancel my subscription to “The New York Times” once I realised I was only reading its comment section, and to complete the word puzzles. In truth, I cannot work out which of these was driving me most to the paper, but even if I agreed with what I was reading, too much of a good thing is still too much, and I haven’t played Wordle since.

 

I was planning this article just as the United States announced tariffs on countries that did not support its intention to take over the Danish territory of Greenland. Such a discombobulating story led me to constantly check my phone for updates, whether they would come or not, until I had enough of a context and grasp on the story. But “flooding the zone” of public discourse with announcements and edicts to keep politicians and countries on edge, dutifully repeated by news channels to keep us informed, only puts everyone on edge – it is an inevitably parasitic capture of the news cycle.

 

I think the only answer is to create your own bulletin – create times when you can update yourself, leave time to think, and see if there are any updates later. It may sound odd to compare it to the Muzak Corporation’s system of background music, known as “Stimulus Progression”, but it worked on the basis that motivational music be followed by periods of silence to limit fatigue.

 

I can only say this has worked for me – I have cut my phone usage by over an hour a day since 2026 began, but again, word puzzles form part of that time.

LISTEN TO ME, DON’T LISTEN TO ME [341]

Hearing the term “fear of missing out” or “FOMO” gives me no reason to fear. It sounds like a term invented to encourage you to “keep up with the Joneses” by tying that impulse to your quality of life, turning it into something too dangerous to get involved with. “FOMO” was first observed as a phenomenon by a marketing strategist, Dr Dan Herman, in 1996, reinforcing this thought for me.

I may have also dealt so often in nostalgia that I believe it is possible to return to everything. There is no fear of missing out on something because there is no way you can miss out, unless you limit its availability. This may be the result of the “Disney vault”, where The Walt Disney Company limited VHS releases of their classic films to keep them special and scarce, until DVD, Blu-ray and streaming video made this practice obsolete.

I thought the limited-edition Coca-Cola Intergalactic flavour, the first in a series of “Coca-Cola Creations”, was only to have been available in North America, but coming across it in my local supermarket was enough for me to try it. The Coke website stated that “we will collaborate to create new flavours, designs and experiences with Coca‑Cola, reimagining our iconic product in time-limited edition flavours which take inspiration from relevant moments across culture, music and gaming”. In this case, Coca-Cola was the first soft drink launched into space, on the Space Shuttle Challenger on 12^th July 1985, the day after the Coca-Cola Company announced they were returning from New Coke to the classic formula.

Starting with Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, Intergalactic turned its dark caramel colour to red, its ingredients including carrot and blackcurrant from concentrates, while the taste is much like the existing vanilla Coke, with a slightly chocolate aftertaste, at least to me. It tasted fine, but not to dissimilar to a Coke flavour I can continue to drink after Intergalactic is withdrawn.

Meanwhile, I have only just started playing Wordle, a daily online word game so successful upon its launch in 2021 that it was bought by “The New York Times” for a substantial sum. Up to now, I had only seen the yellow and green grids posted on Twitter by other players, showing how well they did in guessing what letters made up that day’s five-letter word, and where that letter was placed, although the abstract nature of just seeing the letter-less grid meant it took until an idle moment on approximately day 290 of the game’s history for me to even think of trying the game. I have since concluded the first of my six attempts to guess the word should always be “quiet”, covering two vowels and the first row of my keyboard.

Wordle is a “special edition” word game in the sense that everyone is given the same word to guess in each twenty-four hour period. With no ability to go back to previous games, and with “The New York Times” issuing cease-and-desist orders on copycat websites where you can play previous days’ games, or multiple games a day, you must make a daily appointment to play, or risk missing a game on which you can never catch up. This becomes particularly frustrating if you failed to guess the word that day, or continuously failing to get the rest of a word when you got the second half fairly easily. All word games lead me to think my vocabulary is too small, so that might just be my problem.

The abbreviation “FOMO” was coined by Patrick J McGinnis in 2004, in the Harvard Business School magazine “The Harbus”, but alongside it was “FOBO”, for “fear of a better option”, the act of not making a choice because you are waiting for a better opportunity.

To me, Coca-Cola Intergalactic and Wordle are impacted by “FOBO”. One is a further dilution of the original Coke formula that had no variations until the launch of Diet Coke, but while soft drink manufacturers are fighting to hold attention, the Coca-Cola Company itself took a bolder decision by acquiring Costa Coffee in 2019 to catch where some consumers were going. While “The New York Times” may have avoided its own fear of missing out on the next big thing by buying Wordle, closing down unauthorised copies, without offering what made them so popular as an alternative to their own product, makes me think that eliminating other options for diversifying the game was needed over providing those options themselves, especially to keep the “FOMO” factor of the standard Wordle format.