Delayed Gratification – The Slow Journalism Magazine | Hacker News Reader

Delayed Gratification – The Slow Journalism Magazine

slow-journalism.com

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Another great literary magazine/publication is Thinking About Things (https://thinking-about-things.com), which (as far as I remember) doesn't feature anything from the 12 months previous.

There's this news site called Coda Story that this reminds me of. When they originally started their whole thing was that they do 1 or 2, maybe 3 stories per year. And they have an entire team of journalists just focused on those single topics. Instead of blasting you with surface levels introductions to a number of topics you'd get a really deep dive into some specific issues

Unfortunately they've slowly moved away from that model. Still some great journalism coming out of it, but not very novel any more

it doesn't sound like a very profitable business model, sadly. bring back government grants for journalism, I say

Wonder if there are other models. So grants are one. Anything else people experimented with?

The Guardian is largely funded by a sort of specifically set up investment group, but that obviously isn't viable for less established operations.

there's also the donation model, which The Guardian used to operate on.

there's also a charity model, where the newspapers are funded by grants from a charity. that's somewhat similar to the government model, with its own up- and downsides. this is probably the model a conservative would argue for if it became clear that paid subs and adverts weren't serving popular needs.

you've also got the sort of hobbyist/industry blog model that's very common on Hacker News, where people do it in their free time, sometimes as an accompaniment to their main job

the only other model I can think of is scientific journals, where universities pay the wages, and the scientists/unis pay the damn journals to publish their work, which then sell that same work for extortionate sums and don't give any of the money back to the creators

thank you!

Didn't know about Guardian and investment group stuff.

Also great insights about scientific journals. Now I'm thinking, maybe it's possible to have media like that. Where you have day job and you write a bit on the side as an actual expert?

I think there's certainly room in the industry for that as an idea, but I wouldn't want it to become the norm.

it has the potential for all sorts of conflicts of interest and I'm not sure I like the principle of it. if you're an expert in a field, and you're talented enough to write about it for the popular masses, I think you deserve to be fully compensated for that

That sounds more like writing a book about a topic

This is interesting. Of course, it all depends on the execution. I maintain a literary diary, which I flag at the time of writing if I find the writing merited, and that I subsequently brush up and post months, sometimes years later. For something like the July 4th shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, which is where I live, I recorded my feelings immediately, but I know they will take a considerable period of time to write about adequately. It is a very helpful process, and I think the rhetorical import of a slower process is compelling.

Completely agree with this approach. Nowadays when I come across interesting articles, podcasts, videos, etc I add them to collections. When a collection is mature enough I'll start actually reading through them. I find that when I dive into a topic repeatedly across a couple of days (in contrast to doing shallow dives in a much larger array of topics) things just feel... more meaningful. I'm more interested and I feel better able to have an in-depth conversation around those topics

Unfortunately this model of media digest can be really hard to maintain. Especially given that the entire media industry is very strongly moving in the opposite direction.

I wish there was better tools out there to organize reading lists like these, but I haven't found much and I haven't had much of a chance to actually finish one of the many related projects I've started. Maybe some day

Adventure Rider is now creating ADVrider Journal... also a quarterly-ish publication I really enjoy.

https://www.advrider.com/subscribe-to-the-advrider-printed-j...

Is the point to demonstrate how trivial some stories end up being three months later? Or... I'm not sure I get the purpose of covering the introduction of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 three months after it has started killing people.

The point isn't that no news is timely. Some obviously is such as the spread of a highly transmissable disease.

But a lot of news is not timely. In fact a lot of news is misreported precisely because it is reported faster than a sober analysis can be applied. Worse are the bevy of stories which are reported before it can be realized they aren't even stories at all.

Despite this the news media has increasingly invested in the "breaking news" format for everything.

I don't have access, so this is speculation. But I'd hope that, with their publication cadence in mind, instead of just announcing that Omicron exists they'd be able to talk about the emergence of new variants generally and what that will mean for the overall trajectory of the pandemic.

Getting the latest thing that you feel the need to prepare for to survive a little bit longer tha the person next to you is a great use for news — but hear me out, you can also inform yourself about an issue that has already happened and pull real useful knowledge from that. E.g. a in depth analysis of why the chip supply crisis started does not need to be totally up to date, it needs to instead make very complex topics understandable in a good way, by having a long term look on certain actors, industries etc.

Sure, and I subscribe to a number of newsletters that dig into issues like that regularly. I just didn't see enough information on the linked site to make it clear that is what was happening. My question was an honest one: if the point is to demonstrate that the rush to fill a 24-hour news cycle is unhealthy, then great! But the selection of articles seems to focus on the latest news just the same, with a delay of three months.

It seems both too late to report on Omicron from a preventative point of view, and maybe also too early for an in-depth look back, especially in April when issue #45 was published with an article entitled "The arrival of Omicron." If you want to look back in depth, maybe focus even earlier than three months ago. And I you want to focus on current news, well, I'm still not sure the point.

I'm getting a lot of mockery here for a bare link to a site that doesn't explain itself well. The rush to judgment might suggest that you all need to engage in a bit of delayed gratification, rather than piling on. At least I poked around enough to notice particular article titles and publication dates.

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