by Atul Hatwal
It’s the never-ending reshuffle. This farrago started yesterday morning and is still going over a day later. Current estimates are that it will run past tomorrow and end as a four day marathon by the time the junior posts are announced.
Journalists have been moaning about the length of time its taken and they’re right.
More than they know.
In the old days, Before Twitter (BT), the news cycle used to last 24 hours. Now its shorter, much shorter. According to this academic study of the 2012 US Presidential election, by Professor Daniel Kreiss, it’s gone down from 24 hours to 2 hours.
This means a single day, After Twitter (AT), is now equivalent to 12 days of BT news cycles.
If the Corbyn reshuffle goes on for four days that will be 48 news days in old money – almost 10 working weeks worth of stories.
No wonder people are moaning.
Obviously the elapsed time will remain 4 days, but the frustration and ennui of journalists (and many of their readers) is a vivid illustration of just how news has changed.
And as for Jeremy Corbyn’s team, allowing a negative Labour story like this to dominate double digits of news cycles, it is wholly unprecedented.
Another first to chalk up for the Labour leader.
Atul Hatwal is editor of Uncut
Tags: Atul Hatwal, Jeremy Corbyn, news cycles, reshuffle, Twitter
The reshuffle will not make a lot of difference – we still have a leader who is unpopular with the general public – way down in the polls and with any policies that we know about largely unworkable. Interesting the canny Scot, Nicola Stergeon is now shouting ‘education, education, education’ as her driving policy in Scotland and Cameron promising to tackle inequality in his new year message – sound familiar.
All fair points but what are you going to do ? How long can you whinge while your Party is reduced to a laughing stock ?
Strangely I have little sympathy with this post. That the Twitter generation have the attention spans of goldfish is no reason for Corbyn to speed things up.
On the other hand, the reshuffle started 24 hours ago and so far all I know is Dugher has been sacked. Is it one replacement per day as well as one sacking per day? We could be here some time.
Lets get things in perspective shall we. As at late Tuesday night, two rather uninspiring run-of-the-mill second rate politicians with no future this side of Judgement Day have been demoted.
And that’s about it.
Biggest non-event since the Mayan ‘End Of Times ‘ and the Y2K Millenium Bug.
Reshuffles are supposed to be blood on the carpet. I’ve shed more blood shaving.
Christ on crystal meth, what a non-event.