"Funnel Time” in the Heartland: Shifting Temporalities and Changing Materialities at The Omaha World-Herald

Abstract

The digital transformation of Nebraska’s Omaha World-Herald offers a counterfactual: whether the newspaper industry’s transition to digital news would have been so jarring had a newspaper kept up a tradition of multiple print editions. In 2016, the newspaper ended its “all-day” publication cycle of both a print morning and print evening edition to prioritize digital news and the morning newspaper. The unique affordances of this particular case and its local culture of production bring together questions of time, materiality, and geography. Introduced is the concept of “funnel time” as a way to understand the multidimensionality of time as experienced by journalists and as captured in news objects.