Introduction.

Summary Insofar as journalism corresponds to an activity of information production, its stakes are fundamentally temporal. As Alban Bensa and Éric Fassin remind us in their introduction to the dossier that the journal Terrain devoted to the notion of "event" in 2002, media discourse easily relies on the "event" insofar as it constitutes a break in intelligibility: better still, this is its very project - unlike the social sciences, which are accustomed to paying attention to structures and their permanence in the long term, and as such are hampered in apprehending such breaks. In some respects, journalism works with temporality, whether it is a question of its disruptions (in the case of the "event"), of its repetitions (as shown by those recurring subjects that the professional jargon calls "chestnuts"), of its anticipation (when reports follow one another while converging on the same point, e.g. an election), or of its twists and turns (examples of "media soap operas" abound) (first lines).