I used to work at Tortoise (who now own/operate The Observer) and our motto was 'Slow News'. We operated on a pretty transparent membership model, but I got the impression that it was difficult to make pure membership work financially, leading to a reliance on other revenue streams like podcasting and business partnerships over time.
I have often thought about with my friends who are "terminally online" that they would benefit from NOT being a town crier from times gone by.
Many of my friends hate Twitter, hate Elon and hate social media, but because they have to be first to all the latest news, they remain locked in to Twitter day in and day out. They cannot quit. They are socially bound to them because being the person to start a topic on whats happened in Ukraine, who was traded to the Dolphins, etc is part of their socialization.
It's been baffling to me, as I simply don't see the value in being the "first" to discuss some news, especially if its misinformation.
Anyway, all that to say that I think is a great idea and would really benefit society to return back to less "real time" news, which really tends to drown out the big topics in favor of buzz words and Twitter quips.
I agree. Aside from emergencies or other truly circumstance-changing news, I am not sure there's really any value in being immediately informed vs. days or perhaps even weeks later. I just hadn't thought in these terms before.
I can't help but imagine how much healthier our society would be...
If you feel interested in following them but it feels too high traffic or chaotic you can follow specific categories with rss by just going to subcategories on the website and adding /feed to the end of the url. Even slower journalism!
For example I follow the long reads one: https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/long-reads/feed
You can do that trick with a lot of sites. One of your old faves started pumping out listicles but still puts out good stuff here and there? Might be worth seeing if those higher quality articles have their own categories with feeds.
I haven't really had that problem with news.
Delayed Gratification – The Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32222831 - July 2022 (16 comments)
Delayed Gratification: A Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200573 - Jan 2020 (23 comments)
I figure the fact that news has turned into hedonic consumption is the much bigger deal. Neil Postman wrote a book, Amusing Ourselves to Death outlining how mass media turned all programming into entertainment programming. Everything is stimulating, emotionally charged etc. That to me seems to be the exhausting part.
So as for the title of this publication people really seem to be into the "delayed" part but I think the "gratification" part might be the problem
In between a myriad of notifications, fake social media posts, total collapse of local radio and tv, I have no idea of how to stay informed.
Ultimately, it didn't work for me, but that's my fault. Despite my best intentions, it turned out I wasn't interested in reading about world affairs beyond the news cycle.
i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"
We can live in a society where a massive scandal happens and it takes two months for the systems and mechanisms to respond to it. I genuinely believe that most stories are better delivered with full information and nuance well after the event occurs than immediately.
This advertises up to a 3 month delay. I do like that with that much lead time you can see not just news but sometimes a bit of the fallout and consequences.
Not a fan of the name, though. It reads like those Claude comments that I absolutely despise, where it feels the need to comment in a reactionary way to the feedback it's getting and changes it's making, rather than a forward-looking way that's cohesive with the new state of the codebase.
Maybe I missed it, but is there a back issue available I could page through, or even just a full story somewhere, that I could read so I can evaluate what I think of it?
Wrong. Great effort goes into ensuring only the desired statements are regurgitated, and the undesirable ones omitted: https://www.foxnews.com/media/ap-report-slain-north-dakota-t...
This is not a cherry-picked example, but the policy of most major media, explicitly outlined in their style guides: https://jfulford.substack.com/p/hiding-the-race-of-criminals...
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
[1] https://apnews.com/article/correspondents-dinner-trump-shoot...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/democrats-senate-fisa-trump-pulte...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/california-tank-leak-explosion-ga...
What would you need to start such a project?
My latest life hack which I can recommend to anyone, at least in Germany: as part of my local library membership I get access to the PressReader app, which gives me access to the print edition of the economist! At 10 EUR a year it’s so affordable it nearly feels like it’s unethically so for what I get. I guess I’ll close with: May we forever be blessed with libraries, and may they never be „optimised away“ as an unnecessary social good.
[0] https://cbc.ca/
[1] https://bbc.com/
[2] https://npr.org/
When life finally happened, I had to force myself to "slow" down. By "slow" I don't mean read less news, but rather I'd dedicate a week a month for catching up to the prior month's news (via RSS, etc).
And that's where I learned the same lesson as you: It's better to read about a news event a month or so after the actual event. The first few days is mostly speculation, and it's best not to get rumors in your head. Seeing all those articles at once makes it easy to glean what did and didn't happen. Seeing them piecemeal over a month made it harder.
(I don't bother with news any more, but that lesson stuck with me).
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...
The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.
Consuming news has little to do with being informed. Quite the opposite, at times.
They're a good fit on your "one week" timescale.
A newspaper called The Economist should not take a hyper-critical view of conservatism or right-leaning politics across the globe, and hyper-liberal views about decisions leaders are making. I do not need my morals being shaped by my news outlet - full stop.
I find the Week and the Financial Times to be significantly better.
Free, consumer website: https://www.forth.news Paid site with custom notifications and feeds: https://pro.forth.news
News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:
1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)
2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online
Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.
This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.
Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.
This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.
Yes.
> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases
No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.
I don't recall it really surfacing things that didn't make the news cycle, but one thing I failed to mention is they had (have?) really good infographics/visualizations! They have a lot of the more recent ones here https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/infographics
The facts chosen to include in a report are chosen with bias. There's no neutral subset of facts about any event.
Both are well written and well researched and although they both take an ulta-capitalist view of the world (might be good to also read something more socialist-leaning), at least when it comes to social issues you might get a bit more of a nuance by comparing their takes.
I'm trying to tell people, you have to take initiative, you have to have agency and be responsible for your own attention.
If you are being "fed" from a "feed" you are being fattened for slaughter
People that get sucked into social media srolling for hours know that they're not doing something good for themselves, people are guzzling from the fear-monger newshose and they think they're doing something "healthy".
Neutral journalism is not presenting the claims of all opposing parties, it's fact-checking the claims of both sides without a bias for any of them.
If one party says the truth and the other side is not, it's still neutral to repeat only the claims of the first one.
It is fairly maddening when you know what they say is completely inconsistent with what was happening.
Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.
I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.
Btw, nice initiative with Forth! That's why I clicked.
Looks like I didn’t rotate my certificate. Eek
The Pro site is all self-curated by the user, and forth.news is a series of LLMs doing grouping, summarization/headline writing, measuring urgency, categorization, etc.
Those are the things among many others that actually make you informed about the world, in my opinion, not the news feed.
There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.
Maybe they can't credibly fudge the numbers, but they can find enough data to agenda-set pretty much anything.
