时间既是新闻生产所能仰赖的资源，又对生产中的组织和个体施加着严厉的约束， 成为形塑新闻面貌的一股主要力量。经典的新闻室民族志研究对效率、节奏、日程、即 时性、截稿期等时间因素的论述深化了我们对新闻业“因时而作”这一特性的理解。但 在当前数字环境下的新闻生产中，这些基于传统新闻形态生成的时间模式和实践发生了 哪些变化？这些变化对于当前的新闻业又有何意义？本文希望通过系统地检视经典文献 和前沿研究，探究时间在新闻生产中的角色和意涵所发生的变化。

时间作为日常生活重要的符号系统，不仅发挥着协调社会运行的制度性功能，同时作为社会化的重要路径，个体也通过对这一制度性符号系统的习得，不断形塑着个体社会认知与想象。借助埃利亚斯社会文明化的发生学视角，一方面，宏观社会关系结构变迁造成了个体时间经验的抽象化，并形塑出普遍“线性的”理性时间认知机制。另一方面，于日常生活的时间运作中，基于个体“现在的”主体经验形塑出特殊的微分时间认知机制。进而，在两种认知机制相互作用下，时间成为日常生活中即熟悉又陌生的个人惯习一部分，时间迷思由此产生。而在当代社会加速的现代化境遇下，基于对“现在的”时间性社会想象的反思将为当下社会学反思及想象力拓展提供空间。

To understand news rhythms, scholars have primarily studied how the rituals and routines of news organizations align with the practices and expectations of audiences. The rhythms of today’s networked press, though, are set not only by journalists and consumers but also by largely invisible digital infrastructures: software, data, and technologies from outside newsrooms that are increasingly intertwined with journalistic work. Here, we argue that the rhythms of the contemporary, networked press live in the materials, practices, and values of hybrid, time-setting sociotechnical systems, a new concept we call anticipatory news infrastructure. We explicate this concept through a typology of sociotechnical dynamics, showing how the networked press is poised to sense events, structure journalistic work, predict and commodify traffic, architect audience relations, and categorize content. We argue that these infrastructures anticipate possible public life, thus creating anticipation publics through their largely invisible power to shape expectations of journalists and audiences alike.

News time has since the late 19th century moved away from storytelling to embrace modern progress. But time in news is elusive. The digital era splinters time, leaving news practice and research behind. A project to track US news into the 21st century documents a history of time in news: the realism of ‘who’, ‘where’, and ‘what’ declined, and the modernism contexts of ‘when’ and ‘why’ expanded. All five Ws moved contrary to expectation. Modernism tries to map time, but its definition is undecidable – even among logicians. Practitioners of news grapple with their topic: the realist now, and try to fit it into the modernist ‘standard time’, a time regime that imposes a big-picture interpretation onto their readers. The modern view equates clock time, a purely social invention, to quantifiable nature. Clock time offers an artificial view of the passage of time, but scientists dictated another big picture. ‘For us’, wrote Einstein, ‘who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future has no other meaning than that of an illusion, though a tenacious one’. Time, although quantifiable, does not pass; its passing is an illusion and the objective view of the world is an immutable one. Coming to grips with the elusiveness of time, as it slips away from reporters and the grasp of scientists, creates opportunities for practitioners of news to align with contemporary mediated experiences. Facing the problem of time is done through Alfred North Whitehead, in whom the present moments is not a point of infinitessimal length on a single modernist time-line but an indivisible event that ‘grows literally by buds or drops’ of experience (William James in Whitehead), a landing ground which he calls the ‘actual occasion.’ Past, present, and future are not illusions, but symptoms of the subjective experience of process, which is not only real; it is part of the fundamental actual occasion. Weaving in Arendt’s distinction between ephemeral labor and permanent work illustrates how process philosophy can be grounded in both the labor and work of journalists, allowing news practitioners to adapt to digital times.

As noted by Jaworski et al. (2003a, 2003b, 2004), a significant amount of news items refer to future events. This article examines the `discourse of the future' in order to identify its extent and different types. The research examined headlines in Israeli newspapers over a period of 18 years (1985—2003) and found that approximately 70 percent of the main headlines deal not only with past events but with future ones as well. Thus, contrary to the conventional perception of journalism, this type of journalism does not report what has already happened, but speculates on future events, whether directly or by quoting military or political figures.

As traditional institutions have weakened, the news media have been expected to carry more of the burden of organizing public opinion and debate. In general, however, the news agenda is an unsuitable basis for political action. There are always critical problems facing society, but whether they play a large or small part in the news, and do so in a true or distorted form, depends significantly on how they conform to the time-driven demands of the news cycle. The news is deliberately shortsighted, is rooted in novelty rather than precision, and focuses on fastbreaking events rather than enduring issues.

This article examines the representation of past, present, and future in print and online news, while establishing a link between the temporal orientation of news stories and the constraints of the news cycle. Based on a content analysis of top news stories in the Israeli media, the study shows that a future temporal orientation is more prevalent in print media, which assume the role of projecting upcoming events, analyzing potential outcomes, and shaping collective expectations. In contrast, online news tends to assume the more commonly recognized journalistic role of informing the public on recent-past events. The discussion introduces the notion of “temporal affordances,” referring to the temporal constraints and possibilities of media technologies, which in turn can lead to distinctive content characteristics. These affordances, which connect symbolic and material dimensions, contribute to the shaping and reshaping of the functions served by divergent communication outlets in changing media landscapes.