This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.
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.
It's heartening to see that Delayed Gratification has successfully continued their work for so long.
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.
Sounds very appealing. Anyone here have experience with it? If I want to try it, should I go print or digital? How is the writing compared to say The Economist or other more mainstream options?
I've been building something similar for my own purposes. Basically, I use Calibre's "Fetch News" functionality to get epubs of all the news sources I trust, and then once a month (interval is configurable), I run a pipeline over all of it (some LLM magic, partly local partly API) to dedupe and rank stories, then compile it into an actual honest-to-goodness newspaper (using Typst for layout and stuff), then read that at my leisure.
the twenty-four hour news cycle's unyielding need for urgent content has broken many people psychologically and we need to 'deprogram' them.
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?"
Delayed gratification in my case was going through three captchas before I could even read the advert for a magazine. I know it's common but that disrespect for the customer irks me. How do people here find the content, is it worth trying again?
highlighting this as 'slow journalism' is a bit odd - it's a magazine, there are lots of them, quarterly etc. The slowness is a given, the delay is the feature.
In this spirit, I prefer to not read any online news, or daily newspaper, but the weekly Economist in print. It has higher quality writing than all the rest, has a built in capacitor buffer against high frequency low signal bullshit (noise) by virtue of being weekly, and contains all the information about the world that mattered in that time period. Zero engagement bait because it's an expensive subscription.
Interesting. I wonder where the "sweet spot" on the delay is. I've given up online news and twitter and all that entirely, and just read my print Economist, which comes weekly. That already has the news somewhat delayed and presumably with less of a rush to report has a little more fact checking.
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?
I was subscribed to this. It's beautifully designed, well written, good paper stock, the works. If the idea appeals to you, it's worth trying.
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 learned about Delayed Gratification when someone linked "The last of the Flying Wallendas" (https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...) in a chatroom. In the spirit of the magazine, I set a reminder to read it in a year. I decided to do it again when the reminder triggered. A total of three years later, it was a good article.
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!
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.
One thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes from other officials/politicians saying the opposite. As an example, how many times has the strait of Hormuz been declared open by the US, when it turns out it really wasn't? And every time these low-effort articles just echo that statement without even trying to evaluate if that is true. I mean, the transponder data on shipping is publicly available, there's a dozen websites you could use to actually see passage through the strait to verify the claim. If you don't do even the most basic follow ups, is that even a news article? Or is it just a more elaborate form of re-tweeting?
I don't know what qualifies as "mainstream media" here, but I feel various public broadcasters have served me well over the years: CBC[0] in Canada, BBC[1] in United Kingdom, NPR[2] in America, ABC[3] in Australia, NHK[4] in Japan... switching around the world also gives reprieve from local politics letting you tune into someone else's local politics practically recreationally, which seems more and more necessary in the modern world of today. Streaming radio is one of the best things about the contemporary internet.
I think a lot of it has to do with the desire and pressure to publish as fast as possible. Online, EVERYTHING is rushed and even published before the facts are known. The story may or may not get updated as the situation develops.
Outside of tech because it affects my work, I've stopped reading online news altogether. There's a bookstore down the road from me which sells the daily and weekend editions of a couple papers. On a slow weekend I'll walk over there, buy the weekend edition of some reputable paper, and peruse it over coffee. The stories are invariably better than anything I see online, as well as in the daily editions. None of this stuff is urgent. I don't need up to the minute. I just need to kill some time, preferably with higher quality information.
Honestly the old ways were better in this case. Just stop reading online news. Grab a weekend edition of a paper when you're bored instead. Couple bucks. No subscription. Better. They haven't changed much.
> half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort
that is EXACTLY what i want in news.
i do not want your summarization opinion out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet.
Look at how many times the current government has tried to shut down reporting that didn't tow the current party line. Selective access, prosecutions, lawsuits, threats to block mergers, comedians being cancelled while the administration cheers, there's a (s)hitlist of journalists on the whitehouse site, etc.
It probably has something to do with the decline of quality journalism.
News is perpetually in decline just like the old perpetually fear the young will bring humanity to ruin.
Kierkegaard in the 1850s:
"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control."
I wonder how much news related issues have to do with the way news is presented rather than the frequency at which you read the news. Daily news reading doesn't strike me as concerning given that getting a newspaper delivered in the mail in the morning was entirely normal practice and people didn't seem to experience the distress they do now. Between the 20s and up until the 70s almost every American household subscribed to a daily newspaper.
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
The apparent need by the Media to keep issuing constant updates and then suddenly having to retract the story is very frustrating. Each "update" is usually slighly incremental and is invariably a short new paragraph tacked into the previous version. The final version of the story being covered is often a mea culpa retraction because earlier versions were rushed and inaccurate. I'm trying very hard to escape this destructive cycle but it's not easy.
It turns out there are a few stories that are important to be immediately aware of (declarations of war, local events like service outages or celebration - and only if they're planned with short notice). Most of the rest of the news is important for the purpose of holding people to account but outside the influence of regular people.
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.
The problem is that sometimes declaration of war means bombs are falling on your head. Or you are drafted. Sometimes you want to be a bit ahead of big news.
My anxiety levels were massively reduced when I stopped reading the news years back, including blocking any "top story" sidebars, unsubbing from major subreddits.
Sure I'm late to finding out some important information, but it's better than every piece of news that doesn't personally affect me being treated as if it's a world ending event that I must know about right now
58 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 73.6 ms ] threadI 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 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'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?"
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?
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.
It was however entertaining to receive in the mail, inside a nice form-fitting cardboard box with Royal Mail elegantly stamped on it.
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.
[0] https://cbc.ca/
[1] https://bbc.com/
[2] https://npr.org/
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/
[4] https://www.nhk.or.jp/
Outside of tech because it affects my work, I've stopped reading online news altogether. There's a bookstore down the road from me which sells the daily and weekend editions of a couple papers. On a slow weekend I'll walk over there, buy the weekend edition of some reputable paper, and peruse it over coffee. The stories are invariably better than anything I see online, as well as in the daily editions. None of this stuff is urgent. I don't need up to the minute. I just need to kill some time, preferably with higher quality information.
Honestly the old ways were better in this case. Just stop reading online news. Grab a weekend edition of a paper when you're bored instead. Couple bucks. No subscription. Better. They haven't changed much.
that is EXACTLY what i want in news.
i do not want your summarization opinion out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet.
just be a parrot.
It probably has something to do with the decline of quality journalism.
Kierkegaard in the 1850s:
"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control."
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
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.
Sure I'm late to finding out some important information, but it's better than every piece of news that doesn't personally affect me being treated as if it's a world ending event that I must know about right now
And we need to stop taking anyone seriously who doesn't abide by it.
Kick them out of mainstream media if necessary.
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.