Dictionary

news cycle en · NOUN

Etymology

US origin, 1920s.

Meanings

1. The reporting of a particular media story, or news in general, from the first instance (breaking news) to the last, often including reporting on public and other reactions to the earlier reports, now especially via social media; (originally) the reporting for a particular schedule or deadline in broadcast or print, as in a daily paper.
   • There are some old hands in the public relations business who continue to hold on to the belief (or is it vain hope?) that the media operate around news cycles. For younger readers, I feel compelled to explain what a news cycle is. News cycles operate around deadlines when publications or broadcast news shows operate on a regular schedule. […] Unless it is a huge story, anything coming in after the deadline is going into the next news cycle. 2003, Gerald R. Baron, Now is Too Late: Survival in an Era of Instant News, FT Press, →ISBN, page 69:
   • Every other news cycle, when any particular quake related to someone saying something stupid or disagreeable or out of touch or oftentimes simply oversharey occurs, it triggers a recurrent tsunami of contemplation of why any of us in the industry are on the hellsite at all. 2022 April 14, Delia Cai, “Severance, the New York Times’s Twitter Guidelines, and the Forever Illusion of Work-Life Balance”, in Vanity Fair:
   • There was a time, years ago, when August could be counted as a slow news month in Washington. That’s now a distant memory, in no small part because the current president has an insatiable need to be in the news cycle. […] The aide told me that Trump was looking to intimidate Pyongyang—but that he was also annoyed that he hadn’t been the central storyline on cable news. The bellicose rhetoric worked: Suddenly, Trump had changed the news cycle. 2025 August 7, Jonathan Lemire, “Things Aren’t Going Donald Trump’s Way”, in The Atlantic:
   • It is not hard, obviously, to discern a nomadic sensibility in the diffusion of such terms as "grazing," "surfing," and "browsing," or in the popularity of books by Bruce Chatwin, or in the way the continuous loop of the twenty-four-hour news cycle has become a unifying social feature. 1998 May 14, Cullen Murphy, “The Oasis of Memory”, in The Atlantic, →ISSN:
   • The world had followed every turn of the case so closely that the trial would permanently change the news cycle and media patterns. Americans had never been so consumed by a single news story. 2015 October 2, Julia Zorthian, “How the O.J. Simpson Verdict Changed the Way We All Watch TV”, in Time, archived from the original on 17 Oct 2024:
   • The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle? 2020 September 22, John Branch, Brad Plumer, “Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In”, in New York Times:
   • to dominate the news cycle
   • The Clinton campaign's fundamental insight was that there were at least three news cycles a day—morning, day, and night—and that a campaign could effectively shape the coverage of the evening news and morning papers by driving a story through all these news cycles and beyond. 2012, Christopher Lehane, Mark Fabiani, Bill Guttentag, Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control, St. Martin's Press, →ISBN, page 10:
   • The barrage and whiplash of White House claims of imminent deals and then threats that “a whole civilization will die tonight” have kept Trump squarely where he wants to be – dominating the news cycle – but they have also increasingly eroded trust in his declarations, even in life-and-death issues concerning a war. 2026 June 10, Andrew Roth, “Trump the unreliable narrator fails to force reality to match his story on Iran”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
   • Mr. Trump will surely declare victory in Iran, just as he did last summer. But wars play out in the lives of people and nations, not news cycles. 2026 March 2, Ben Rhodes, “Trump May Come to Regret This”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
   • 24-hour news cycle

Forms

Deriveds

news cyclone

Relateds

outrage culture · CNN effect · rolling news · hype cycle

Translations (4)

uk ци́кл нови́н (reporting of a particular media story) · cmn 新聞循環 /新闻循环 (reporting of a particular media story) · fi uutiskierto (reporting of a particular media story) · uk нови́нний ци́кл (reporting of a particular media story)