We recently came across a Substack post that introduced us to an interesting concept. It’s called “compression culture,” and the TL;DR is that we, as a society, have come to value brevity more than depth. That in our always-connected, information-on-demand, perpetually switched-on world, we have replaced knowledge and understanding with information overload. We have tuned our attention span to be minimally focused at all times.

To attempt our best Rod Serling impression as he might open an episode of “The Twilight Zone." “Presented for your approval, the television newscast. A noble effort to inform, which has devolved into an effort to shovel out headlines, while for the most part, eschewing too much depth that could lead to context and understanding."

Yes, it is a depressing scene.

But examine the evidence presented nightly on your television screen (let alone the countless examples on every other screen you use). Television presents hours of news that almost universally follow a similar formula: The broadcast opens with a series of headlines crafted to draw your attention away from whatever else you might be doing. Each headline is seemingly more urgent and insistent than the one that precedes it.

If you need a good example of this principle in action, watch the opening few minutes of “ABC World News with David Muir.” Muir begins each broadcast with a few terse on-camera headlines, then he delivers as many as eight different stories (at least in our counting) with video clips. This opening segment of the broadcast can go on for two minutes or more. It’s finally punctuated with some story falling loosely into the “hopeful” category, usually under one of the jingoistic franchise names like “America Strong,” “Made in America”, etc. An opening animation finally rolls, and the camera swoops in on Muir at the anchor desk, thanking everyone for watching before telling us one more time about a story or two to come--before (finally) diving into the day’s lead story.

This isn’t some new paradigm to television news, and it isn’t even unique to the network level. The legendary anchor Jim Gardner, on perhaps the even more legendary Action News on Philadelphia’s WPVI, opened his broadcasts with a similar series of quick headlines before delivering the signature opening line: “But the big story on Action News…” And with that, the newscast would be off and running to mow down as many stories as it could in the minutes to come.

By the way, should you doubt the effectiveness of this attention-grabbing format, we would remind you that ABC’s “World News with David Muir” has been the most-watched program on television for nearly the last dozen weeks or so. 

The producers of newscasts have been pressured to deliver “more news” in less time since the medium's earliest days. The pressure to “increase the story count” (meaning to up the number of different stories that are shown in the newscast, regardless of how short or compressed they might have to be) has been in place since the introduction of consultants and research to the business of television, and in turn, television newscasts.

We admit that we have been on both ends of that equation, both delivering and demanding a higher story count in newscasts we have been a part of for the last four decades. 

But no matter how many stories we jammed into the eighteen to twenty or so minutes of each half-hour newscast, the audience has kept shrinking in recent years. We tend to write that off to there being so many more places to get news and information, and, of course, the personalization of receiving only the news we might care about most, driven by the rise of the algorithms that seem to know more and more about us with each passing day.

All of which goes to the point that our "compression culture" continues to squeeze out actual knowledge in favor of a never-ending stream of what we like to think of as countless "news nuggets”-dispensed each day from those ever-present slabs of glass and metal in our pockets. It has become something of a shared addiction when most of us can’t bear to be separated from these devices for any measurable length of time. Let alone placing the device face down while eating or even having a conversation with another person.

Consider for a moment that there were people who went to the polls last November who were surprised to discover that Joe Biden wasn’t on their ballot.

How do we know that this happened? Because the number of Google searches asking “Did Joe Biden drop out?” actually spiked nationwide, with notable increases in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Even though Biden announced his decision not to seek a second term on July 21st, he endorsed his vice president’s candidacy to replace him.

The fact that there is anyone who would not have known of Biden’s decision to drop out of the race should be shocking. The reality that enough people did to spike Google search trends should be considered impossible in our current information age. But as Substack author Maalvika Bhat brilliantly dissects the issue, "It's the logical endpoint of an attention economy that treats human focus as a finite resource to be optimized and monetized.” Her essay is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.

In local television newscasts, we “showcase” those instances where multiple reporters are covering the same story. The “team coverage” label implies a “team” of reporters has been deployed, and with the rare exception of severe weather coverage featuring those “how many boxes with live shots can we jam onto the screen at one time” intros, what is mostly being labelled as “a team” is usually two whole people. We delight in summaries of a big story with a “here’s what we know” bulleted point-by-point graphic, punctuated by the now-standard suffix “we have more for you on our website and mobile app."

Because we have led ourselves to believe that we can combat the march of "compression culture" by being, as Phoenix’s KTVK used to boast, “the place with more stuff."

Whether that “stuff" is of any value or if it helped viewers understand what was happening in their community, state, nation, or world--was somewhat beside the point. And so context has become the missing commodity. There are, of course, brief exceptions to this norm. We’ve seen stations lead their newscasts with lengthy investigative stories, going well over five minutes in length—an eternity in normal measure of ninety seconds as being a long story by television news standards.

While stations and groups are happy to tout their industry awards for producing and airing such stories, usually under the banners of “in-depth” or “investigative,” there seemingly is little appreciation for how those values can translate to any other story presented in the same news program. We have been intrigued by the recent retooling of the “CBS Evening News” to lean into a different playbook for its storytelling. Some notable things are being attempted in that broadcast. Unfortunately, any innovation worth considering is tied to other decisions that will likely doom the current version of the newscast that the storied Walter Cronkite used to anchor.

And that’s before the “ombudsman” promised by the network’s soon-to-be new owners shows up to monitor and address “bias” in the "CBS Evening News.” That was one of the final concessions Skydance offered to finalize their long-tormented deal to acquire CBS parent Paramount Global. It was necessary to overcome the various roadblocks posed by the current administration in Washington, DC. Hank Price, writing in TVNewsCheck, provides some excellent perspective on the likely “Death by Ombudsman” that awaits the legacy that once was CBS News.

Not that what happens to CBS News matters that much in the ongoing slide into irrelevance that is happening to broadcast journalism right before our very eyes. We can’t explain, let alone address, the growing trend of audience abandonment for watching whatever is trending on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Stations continue to try to appease the market forces at work, scrambling to be relevant on those digital platforms by creating content that might hopefully get noticed in the ever-widening sea of short-form videos. Should the force of "compression culture" not act as enough gravity in the downhill slide of the industry? In that case, the lubricant of “purely financial decisions” will be as effective as what Clark Griswold put on the bottom of his sled in that hilarious scene from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation."

We’d like to believe that someone would have the fortitude to buck the tide of compression culture and be brave enough to try leaning into news coverage that features delivering context and contrast over chasing clicks and views. That would be a laudable goal for all of the recently installed news executives who are supposed to be focused on “content" and “storytelling."

It might also be the only thing that stops the march of "compression culture” from turning us from an informed society to an ignorant one.