e are living in a world bombed all the time with information. Encouraged by social media platforms, media organisations churn out as much content as is possible in a bid to retain eyeballs. Smartphone screens scroll incessantly and social media feeds update every second. The competition to deliver information 24/7 is now an unshakeable reality.

How much news do we need is no longer the question. Is human brain even capable of coping with, processing and digesting all the information available out there?

Most mainstream news organisations try to cover as much as they can. The competition from social media and citizen journalists is immense. If you fail to keep up, the general impression is that you are not a ‘good’ media outlet.

The challenge is even harder for smaller digital platforms. They must find ways to compete with broadcast and digital giants, who at times, reach the limit of spamming with their updates.

A general understanding in Pakistani news media outlets is that the more news you ‘break,’ the more relevant you are. Be it a plane crash, a celebrity scandal or a geopolitical flare-up, our screens and timelines flood with the words “breaking news.”

But what happens after the initial shockwave subsides and there’s little to report on?

One example is how the media centre set up at Islamabad’s Convention Centre for the recent US-Iran talks became the focus of news cycles. When no minute-to-minute news was available, most resorted to reporting on the quality of snacks being served. The news media beast had to be fed so samosas and pakoras it was.

In contrast to PTV’s Khabarnama (the state television’s 9pm flagship bulletin) of the day, today our audiences—conditioned by years of minute-by-minute coverage—tune in several times a day expecting more. This feedback loop has transformed journalism into a perpetual motion machine, where silence is the enemy and speculation a friend of the void.

Before the arrival of digital news platforms, the frequency of news was lower. The coverage was disciplined. Audiences read morning papers, special supplement or in case of developing or breaking news, evening broadcasts.

People waited for the news. They accepted information in batches.

On the international front, CNN’s 1980 launch of continuous coverage changed that dynamic. The Gulf War in 1991 cemented “live from the scene” as the gold standard, with anchors reporting in real-time to make sense of whatever information was available.

Since their advent in 2001, Pakistani TV news channels have relied heavily on live beepers to cope with the assumed pressures of 24-hour news coverage. In the good old days of newspapers, there used to be local, regional and national categories. However, when the broadcast media took over, they almost always tried to be national if not an international channel.

When I was working with the BBC Urdu we used to share a daily half-an-hour bulletin with a Pakistani private TV channel. As editor, I was close to crying one day when the news presenter interrupted our programme to run a live beeper on rain in the city. It was a painful 17-minute-long live beeper.

Then came the internet.

It sped up everything. By the early 2000s, broadband and 24/7 TV channels rolled out one after the other. New social platforms such as Twitter (now X) in 2006 gave birth to citizen journalism, where bystanders started posting first, leaving legacy media behind when it came to speed.

A new race had begun.

The goalpost was never quality but quantity. Fake news and videos made it difficult for the audiences to ascertain the facts. Some one-man news platforms, taking liberties with analysing recent reporting drew their own audiences. Domestic tensions meant that anti-government vloggers amassed huge views and followings.

Audiences tried to adjust to the evolution. In a 2010 Pew Research study, 60 percent of American adults checked news hourly on their mobile phones. In Pakistan, endless rich-in-politics beepers and tickers became the mainstay of the media. Many would not even look at what’s playing on the screen but on what’s running below in text.

Social media platforms like TikTok started allowing consumers to post more content. Their philosophy: the more the merrier. Content creators are now encouraged to post no less then three videos a day. Hence, a plethora of very slightly informative but mostly funny content is available on these platforms.

In a hyper-connected world, this contributed to creating a fear of missing out. Algorithms on platforms like TikTok and Instagram prioritise real-time virality. A 2023 Reuters Institute report found that 72 percent of global users expect news “as it happens,” up from 50 percent a decade ago. Contexts like natural disasters or elections amplify this expectation. During Pakistan’s February 2024 general elections, viewers expected results to be beamed live. The delay gave birth to all kinds of rumors.

Constant notifications rewire brains for dopamine hits. When nothing ‘breaks,’ audiences perceive a void or a delay: why isn’t the media covering something? They become suspicious. They start thinking the media is trying to hide something?

Media management was relatively good during last year’s military conflict with India. Official sources constantly fed journalists to control Indian propaganda. Mundane updates (such as “officials still assessing damage” or “the PM holds a meeting”) suffice initially but eventually force media to generate news themselves. We have seen many such stories blow in the face of adventurous journalists. During the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, some channels filled airtime with hypotheticals—mostly what-if scenarios.

The crux: relentless coverage inflates expectations, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Audiences, sated on saturation during crises, normalise it for routine. Health experts fear that this sets in cognitive overload. Audiences abhor repetitions yet complain of under-coverage. The constant jump from one big story to another burns out staff—perpetual shifts erode creativity and quality.

With the arrival of AI, the tool now helps draft tickers and headlines. The audience-media tango has tilted toward overflow, so recalibration is urgently due. Younger demographics (Gen Z) crave context over chaos—if we know how to feed information to them properly. The media needs to learn how people aged 18-24 engage with news today and what this means for newsrooms and news creators. As audiences demand better information, media’s challenge is to curate signal from noise.

The writer has been an editor at the BBC in Pakistan for over two decades. Currently, he is the managing editor at an online news portal.