News Hole

The definition of news hole has evolved over time. Initially the term referred to that part of a newspaper or magazine that is available for news stories, after subtracting the space taken up by advertising. Years later, with the advent of broadcast media, the meaning of the term expanded to include the amount of airtime available for news content within a news broadcast or cable news channel. Today's definition would include the effects of the Internet: offering theoretically unlimited space plus minimal production and distribution costs. In general usage, then, news hole refers to the editorial core of a print or electronic journalism publication or program.

The origins of the term news hole reflect the industrial era within which it was coined. PostCivil War economic growth and large-scale immigration facilitated what historian Martin Sklar (1988) calls the “corporate reconstruction” of the country: This fashioned the newspaper into a more thoroughly industrial product, as pressures for capital accumulation increasingly shaped its ownership, organization, personnel, policies, and content. A newspaper's profitability depended on the ratio of advertising space to the space allocated for news and editorials—space which journalistic shorthand came to refer to as the “news hole.” In a 2008 interview with this writer, longtime reporter George Gladney credited the term's origins to the process of setting type: “I suspect it comes from the forms which printers used to build pages of type. Usually the ads were placed in these forms first, literally leaving a hole for the non-advertising text.”

The term is clearly an old one. It appears in a list of standard “jargon” in journalism work, in a book published in 1911. By the mid-twentieth century the term's definition had expanded to include broadcast media, more specifically the time within a designated radio or television news program that was actually available for editorial content. In a television network evening newscast, that is usually about 22 minutes of the half-hour period. By the early twenty-first century, “news hole” had even become part of public discourse: A 2008 Google search resulted in 113,000 listings. This reflects a broadening of its usage, as postmodern culture and the Internet contribute to an expansion in the varieties of journalism. The well-regarded Project for Excellence in Journalism's reports still use the term in its original meaning, even though newspapers' online editions no longer suffer space limitations driven by the cost of ink and newsprint.

Some newer applications refer to the “news hole” as if it were a physical location, a gathering place for people seeking news, much as a “watering hole” attracts people seeking drink and companionship. Hence, the online edition of Baltimore's The City Paper titles its news section “The News Hole.” MSNBC gives the same name to its “award-winning blog from the cast and crew of the award-winning television news hour.” By contrast The Huffington Post makes a pun in suggesting a gap in the mainstream U.S. news media's coverage of [Page 976]some subjects; its critique's headline reads, “A Different Kind of News Hole.” Clearly separated from a newspaper's physical production processes, today many bloggers use the term news hole simply as a generic label for their musings.

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