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 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.
Did they show the same news as everyone, but later? That seems like it doesn't fully leverage the format. The format seems like it would be good for things that are subtle and got overlooked at the time. But I guess maybe the normal news cycle can surface those same things when they reach a breaking point.
The target audience of this doesn't appear to be people who don't like reading the news. But rather people who like reading journalism that has perspective and nuance (which tend to improve when you take your time to let a story fully develop before writing about it).
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?"
I just wanna throw in that Tangle News[0] strikes a pretty good balance here. Their core offering is detailed breakdowns of what is generally regarded as the top four stories of the week, one a day from Monday through Thursday, which is usually more than enough space to keep you "up on current events", and they usually (though not always) tend to give enough space to let stories develop before summarizing.
The objective here feels like a good candidate for people to vibecode into their homebrew rss readers, in a composite feed. The marked source feeds then get hidden behind a minor effort gate. You still keep your unmarked and “safe” xkcd or whatever feeds as siblings.
our brightest phds are attacking attention from all fronts (ads, social media, news), but the news one in particular is particularly insidious because for years you were told that watching the news made you a good, responsible person. but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.
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".
A well informed population is important. The problem is they're not well informed they're well-hooked to whatever exaggeration and drama the news can whip up.
The invented news and invented intensity is 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.
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.
I have been a long time subscriber to the economist for the same reason. The print edition is great and keeps me feeling informed. If only it wouldn’t include the digital edition too… Invariably, the more stressed I get in my everyday life by work and small children and lack of sleep, the more I get dragged towards the online edition of the economist, and BAM I’m back in the constant instant news cycle again, even though the site doesn’t update that often.
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.
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.
Nope! Every source I care about either has an RSS feed, or I've been able to make a custom recipe [1] to handle things like auth for paid sites and whatnot.
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.
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?
How is the economist these days? Around a decade ago I read it cover to cover every week for 18 months, but during the brexkt referendum they seemed to go into a tantrum and half of the magazine was always about how brexit was 100% a bad thing. Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news because at some point it's like propaganda. I understand they were started in support of trade deals but even so. Has it improved?
> Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news
I can understand why this might seem like a good take to have but sometimes you need 100% biased news because some things are 100% biased. Things like climate change is real or genocide is bad should not be controversial takes. Convincing people that there are two sides to an argument is exactly how you end up with sensationalism and extreme views that push the Overton window.
I've lapsed my subscription because it has, in my opinion, gotten a bit too clickbait-y and many of the articles are sort of thin rehashes of already covered material. It is still better than most, but also fairly pricy.
Having subscribeed for years, I find it very good on that front. I haven't detected any political bias, and I suspect they would say that fairness and honesty is what the "journalism" half of "slow journalism" means.
Agreed, and chances are that due to the nature of the event bring reported, we as readers are unable to influence it in sny way. Therefore a couple of weeks delay will make mo difference.
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?
Thank you. I'll give them a try, if recommended I can forgive captchas because most companies don't really think about the negative user experience and it's unfair to punish one
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.
> 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 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...
We don't have a local newspaper anymore but there are a couple of bloggers who follow city council meetings and other local happenings. I read those fairly frequently. National/world news I have stopped following at all, as 99.5% of it doesn't affect me and I have no influence over any of it.
Most people clearly don't benefit from watching the news, tech news is a bit different but regular news are quite useless in general and plain toxic, I frankly advise everyone to take a break from reading the news altogether, maybe do it once a week, stay informed by other means, you won't miss anything, you'll improve your energy and mental health.
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, gratifying, 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
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?
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.
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?
This is not exactly a new criticism. See e.g. Fisk's complaint from decades ago r.e. "US Officials Say"
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...
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.
Did they show the same news as everyone, but later? That seems like it doesn't fully leverage the format. The format seems like it would be good for things that are subtle and got overlooked at the time. But I guess maybe the normal news cycle can surface those same things when they reach a breaking point.
The target audience of this doesn't appear to be people who don't like reading the news. But rather people who like reading journalism that has perspective and nuance (which tend to improve when you take your time to let a story fully develop before writing about it).
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?"
I just wanna throw in that Tangle News[0] strikes a pretty good balance here. Their core offering is detailed breakdowns of what is generally regarded as the top four stories of the week, one a day from Monday through Thursday, which is usually more than enough space to keep you "up on current events", and they usually (though not always) tend to give enough space to let stories develop before summarizing.
They're a good fit on your "one week" timescale.
[0]: https://www.readtangle.com/
Agreed, they've been a boon for me.
The objective here feels like a good candidate for people to vibecode into their homebrew rss readers, in a composite feed. The marked source feeds then get hidden behind a minor effort gate. You still keep your unmarked and “safe” xkcd or whatever feeds as siblings.
https://www.verity.news/ might be interesting for you; they try to show you both sides of the spin.
Agreed. The 24 hour news and social media with our brightest phds learning to drain all attention from you have broken and radicalized our society.
our brightest phds are attacking attention from all fronts (ads, social media, news), but the news one in particular is particularly insidious because for years you were told that watching the news made you a good, responsible person. but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.
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".
A well informed population is important. The problem is they're not well informed they're well-hooked to whatever exaggeration and drama the news can whip up.
The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.
"hooked" is right.
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
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.
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.
I have been a long time subscriber to the economist for the same reason. The print edition is great and keeps me feeling informed. If only it wouldn’t include the digital edition too… Invariably, the more stressed I get in my everyday life by work and small children and lack of sleep, the more I get dragged towards the online edition of the economist, and BAM I’m back in the constant instant news cycle again, even though the site doesn’t update that often.
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.
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 what now. But not all sources have epubs, right? Is there any one that you're missing now?
Calibre has a feature that will fetch a rss feed or (IIRC) scrape a site and make an epub from it.
Nope! Every source I care about either has an RSS feed, or I've been able to make a custom recipe [1] to handle things like auth for paid sites and whatnot.
[1] https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/glossary.html#term-recipe
epub is ZIP with HTML+CSS+images+some metadata.
They had their 15th birthday late last year: https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...
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.
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.
In the spirit of the magazine, I set a reminder to read https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi... one year later three times. It's a good article.
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?
How is the economist these days? Around a decade ago I read it cover to cover every week for 18 months, but during the brexkt referendum they seemed to go into a tantrum and half of the magazine was always about how brexit was 100% a bad thing. Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news because at some point it's like propaganda. I understand they were started in support of trade deals but even so. Has it improved?
> Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news
I can understand why this might seem like a good take to have but sometimes you need 100% biased news because some things are 100% biased. Things like climate change is real or genocide is bad should not be controversial takes. Convincing people that there are two sides to an argument is exactly how you end up with sensationalism and extreme views that push the Overton window.
I've lapsed my subscription because it has, in my opinion, gotten a bit too clickbait-y and many of the articles are sort of thin rehashes of already covered material. It is still better than most, but also fairly pricy.
It seems fine now
You mean "The E-Communist"?
Also interested in what their biases may be. Being "slow" isn't really enough, they also need to be fair and honest.
Having subscribeed for years, I find it very good on that front. I haven't detected any political bias, and I suspect they would say that fairness and honesty is what the "journalism" half of "slow journalism" means.
I'd love a breaking news service that gives me the latest headlines -- but only if they are still true 2 weeks later.
Agreed, and chances are that due to the nature of the event bring reported, we as readers are unable to influence it in sny way. Therefore a couple of weeks delay will make mo difference.
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?
if you like print journalism they're a good option with great print quality
Thank you. I'll give them a try, if recommended I can forgive captchas because most companies don't really think about the negative user experience and it's unfair to punish one
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.
> 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 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...
We don't have a local newspaper anymore but there are a couple of bloggers who follow city council meetings and other local happenings. I read those fairly frequently. National/world news I have stopped following at all, as 99.5% of it doesn't affect me and I have no influence over any of it.
Most people clearly don't benefit from watching the news, tech news is a bit different but regular news are quite useless in general and plain toxic, I frankly advise everyone to take a break from reading the news altogether, maybe do it once a week, stay informed by other means, you won't miss anything, you'll improve your energy and mental health.
one of the first commenters commenting about not being first - irony
https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/all_or_nothing_fallacy...
Does this publication assume prior basic knowledge of the past months’ events?
I generally wait for a story to get a full feature in The New Yorker or The Atlantic before I give it my attention. Similar concept
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, gratifying, 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
I enjoyed this magazine and subscribed to it for a while, but I wish there was a US-centered version of it for those of us on this side of the pond.
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?
Luckily the magazine came long before Claude, but I suppose your comparison describes their mission pretty well. It's a haven of non-AI writing.
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.