Have we all lost our way with what we consider ‘breaking news’?

These editor’s letters are designed to give you a look inside The Independent’s newsroom, through the eyes of an editor. There’s just one problem today – I haven’t been in our New York City newsroom for almost a month.

I wasn’t on the steps of the Supreme Court interviewing protesters; I wasn’t on the press bench at the courthouse as Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison; and I wasn’t scribbling away on Capitol Hill as Trump bombshells dropped.

Instead, I was sipping some mai tais on a break in Hawaii – I assumed June was going to be a quiet news month...

But all is not lost for this week’s column, trust me. Jenny Odell, in her brilliant book, How To Do Nothing, says that the point of doing nothing for a while “isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive”.

That got me thinking about the business of breaking news, and how to make what we do more useful to readers. The day before I got on my flight, the new boss of CNN, Chris Licht, told staffers to cool it with the breaking news banner. If you’re not a regular viewer, you should know that off the back of almost every commercial break, an anchor is breathlessly saying: “Happening now, breaking news…” followed by something that in the days of paper and ink would have been a detail folded into the main lede.

“This is a great starting point to try to make ‘breaking news’ mean something BIG is happening,” Licht wrote in a company memo. Breaking news alerts, from almost all news organisations, have become unmoored from the original definition. A presidential impeachment gets the same banner and treatment as a dry process story that’s rolling through the Capitol.

As someone who’s worked in digital media for a decade, push notifications are even more interesting to me. My phone screen is the most personal screen I have: I arrange apps how I’d like; I restrict access to me alone; and I only let the people I like have my number.

When I trust an app to send me push notifications, I want that power to be used sparingly. But the daily deluge of notifications means I turn off almost all of them outside of work hours, and to be honest, just how far off the grid do you need to be to miss out on a presidential resignation, a royal death, or the outbreak of World War 3, for more than 20 minutes, tops?

And there’s nothing like waking up in the middle of the Pacific, seeing 10 different breaking news push alerts on a story that happened hours ago, to highlight just how short their shelf life is.

So, in my dream news world, with what would I replace the breaking news arms race? Well, whatever your political persuasion, the overwhelming feeling when faced with negative breaking news is helplessness. A major event happens, you’re told about it, and then you’re adrift in a sea of anxiety.

Imagine a major event happens, and instead of incremental breaking updates, you get incremental ways to help. “This senator is a wavering vote – how to call his office now”, “The fastest and most-effective way to provide aid to these natural disaster victims”, or “Three companies to boycott right now who donated to this terrible politician”.

When I started out in local newspapers, you’d often hear the term “news you can use”. As a young gun who just wanted scoops, signposting people to the latest council meeting seemed a bit dull in comparison. But as I’ve got older, I’ve seen the worth of a news organisation as activist.

The Independent – and our sister site, Indy100 – already stand apart from other media organisations in making change happen, rather than just reporting on the world. As acting editor of Indy100, my time away led me to realise it’s something I want to double-down on.

Yours,

Dave Maclean

US features editor