One essential element of news is that it is, just that, new. But one of the biggest stories of the year falls outside that definition.
With just over five months to go, we know precisely when 1999 will turn into 2000. Although it will fill acres of newsprint and hundreds of hours of broadcast time, although the men and women of the millennium are already being selected (Li Ka-shing heading one poll of top entrepreneurs of the past thousand years), the change of date in itself signifies nothing.
Go to bed early on the night of December 31, get up for breakfast on January 1 and the world will be the same - except, maybe, for one thing, the Y2K bug.
The bug is just what is needed to give real spice to the change of millennium. The prospect of the world grinding to an electronic halt at the stroke of midnight is meat and drink to a generation weaned on mega-disaster movies.
As seers and prophets have always known, there is nothing like the threat of a really good disaster to grab the imaginations. A thousand years ago, doomsters in Europe attracted flocks of followers by foreseeing the destruction of the world, or, at least, the spread of plagues not seen the days when the Almighty wreaked vengeance on the Egyptians.
How much better, though, the Y2K bug, with nuclear missiles shooting off at random, the world financial system seizing up, airliners crashing out of the sky, telecommunications failing and all the other portents of the ultimate revenge of the computer chip on humanity.
The real popular hook of the millennium bug is that, however much we are reassured of the precautions taken against it, we can never be entirely sure.