Newspapers and Magazines Are Not Timelines

Published at 07:45 on 2 November 2025

Time to clarify what I recently published here.

Per my recent definition, newspapers and magazines might appear to be timelines, but they are not. This is because all articles in a publication have a single source: the the individual (or typically) firm producing the publication. Everything goes through the same editorial team before it gets in. The information has been curated by humans.

The exception would be a publication with extremely lax (or no) editorial standards whatsoever, which simply publishes everything (or nearly everything) submitted to it. Those would be timelines.

This also explains why the posts of an individual social media account are not timelines, even though virtually all social media users repost content from others. Those reposts were still done by a human. The information has still been curated.

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