Slower News

[divan]

I use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events for keeping track of what's going on in the world without being inundated into short-term reactions, clickbait and hype.

[kickscondor]

A minimalist version of that: https://legiblenews.com

[parhamn]

This is so cool! Thanks for sharing.

[timwaagh]

I feel the name is a misnomer. These articles are opinion and analysis. News is different. Slow news would not be very interesting, either.

[smarx007]

Well, I think that's the key observation: when you no longer chase "breaking" news, you have to provide more analysis. When "X does Y", you don't usually need to learn about it within 60 minutes. You usually need to understand "What are the implications of this? Is Y really necessary? What is the motivation driving X?". I can recommend subscribing to the paper version of The Economist, you will see that the "breaking" news section is usually just 2 pages long ("The world this week" in https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2020-12-05). The rest is mostly analysis (of the current events) and opinion.

[CraigJPerry]

Is news different?

If you’re reading the AP wire then yes it is different, it’s just dry facts with limited context or framing.

That’s not how most people consume news though. That is far too dry for most and you’ll likely miss key observations because you can’t possibly be up to speed with every context. In mainstream news the correspondent for X will helpfully add that knowledge to the story being reported so you can understand the new facts in context.

News as I’m thinking you’re meaning it, would be that model, the facts and a curtailed context, often eliding the “for and against” arguments to go straight to a ready to consume conclusion that should neatly fit the reader’s prior preferences.

The exploration of the for and against is usually cut out of news since it sells better and costs less to produce.

[skybrian]

Slower news should be a bit more like writing history. You probably already remember the top-level facts for the stuff that made headlines for a few days, but what about specialized fields?

I’d be happy to read a well-written yearly summary of the most important news in neuroscience, for example.

[jonnycomputer]

Actually, I've been interested in reviving something that might be called slow news. Its more like the weekly news digest. Lots of times first reports are inaccurate, or woefully incomplete, and the corrections never get noticed; also, sometimes we need to slow down to cogitate on the news instead of just reacting to it.

[philliphaydon]

Slow news would probably be more factual correct as the story can have time to be verified and researched. Rather than the... fake news that main stream media has fallen into. Write now fact check later and follow up later on a hidden post.

[briefcomment]

I’d like the opposite. A twitter feed with just facts, (or allegations with timely follow ups) relevant to a specific topic. The hard part is getting one entity to report this with no bias. Maybe this is a job for bots + AI.

[loughnane]

To me this is solved for a lot of domains. The economist (and prob some other weekly’s) do a good job for general news, and I’m sure some newsletters do the job for other domains.

The key is finding slow news for the niche you care about.

Personally I think that a big gap is local news. Would love a site like wickedlocal but where I get things weekly and have no ads or superfluous stories. I’d pay for it.

I’m experimenting with some automated scraping of news sources (Twitter, Reddit, town websites, stores, restaurants, etc) for my town. Hoping to be able to get it do a point where I can produce something of value on 1hr a week.

[ralgozino]

I think mailbrew[0] could be of your interest, it lets you add some sources and it will send you a periodic digest of them.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with them anyhow, nor use their service.

[0] https://mailbrew.com

[umvi]

Agree. I'm a big fan of "The New Paper" [0] for "slow news".

[0] https://thenewpaper.co/

[fsflover]

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Journalism.

[fra]

For what it’s worth, the New York Review of Books accomplishes this for me. Don’t let the title fool you, they write in depth about current affair topics.

[flother]

I came here to say the same thing. Opening a new issue of The New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books are two of the great pleasures in life.

https://lrb.co.uk/ https://www.nybooks.com/

[loughnane]

I looked into them recently but found their tone a bit too partisan than, say, the economist.

Which is fine if you’re looking for that sort of commentary, but in terms of news it’s not what I was looking for.

[whym]

There is an RSS feed (linked at the bottom of the page): https://www.slowernews.com/rss.xml

[throwawaysea]

Interesting project, but it comes off as a bit like a personal list. An I supposed to consume this in some order? Would the addition of article dates help? Maybe a TOC at the top?

[codingdave]

I think personal lists of interesting news and articles are good things. I'd much prefer people to go back to this style vs. the algorithmic "feed" we see on the big sites these days.

[masswerk]

Interesting project in low-stress Tufte design. Maybe include the source/origin of the individual stories?

[mjhirn]

Unlike some of those top comments, I actually like your curation a lot. Prefer it to The Economist, New York Book Review, and the other sites ppl linked in the comments. Good job!

I know you have an RSS feed, and the crowd here probably is all for RSS, but I would love it if I could leave my email somewhere and get a notification when a new submit was posted.

[exochrono]

I use IFTTT to get RSS feed updates into my inbox! This is the applet I've been using for many years now - https://ifttt.com/applets/rhYv7ixE

[usr1106]

A BBC article from 2018 covering Navalny. You could call that oldernews.

[segfaultbuserr]

Not everything on Hacker News is "news", old articles and blog posts are perfectly acceptable. Thus, if "Slower News" is understood as a slow "Hacker News", the name is valid by inheritance.

[lmarcos]

It's funny; I would classify that article as "new" news because for me it's new, as in I never heard of it before.

[aliceryhl]

This particular selection doesn't seem that interesting to me, but I like the idea.

[carschno]

Looks roughly like https://www.the-syllabus.com/, although presumably less firm (no criticism, just a different approach).

[webscout]

Also check out the user-curated section of https://upstract.com for good and less time-sensitive reads.

[embit]

I do the same [1] but for tech news

[1] https://embit.ca

[Bakary]

Maybe a better question to ask would be why not drastically decrease the amount of news altogether, instead of just switching to opinion pieces or some other gimmick?

[paulpauper]

meh. the order should be chronological instead of by category. Given the multitude of content online, the likelihood that someone an curate a list that does not miss stuff I may be interested in, is tiny. People have tired to create aggregators, and with the exceptions of Hacker News and Drudge, they tend to fail.

[gandutraveler]

I thought of creating something like this back in 2015 and while doing research it ultimately made me realize that slow news always existed in form of biweekly magazines like economist. The main solution for me was to turn off all the breaking news notifications.

[vuciv1]

ah damn. I've been working on a project that is supposed to emulate getting The Sunday Paper.

Only updated on Sundays with the top headlines of the week. No annoying pings, no data collection, etc.

I was demotivated when I scrolled through this, but luckily I still feel as though mine is different enough.

[xixixao]

It’s encouraging that others have been contemplating this idea - I have been too.

For me the key is that content can come every day, but it is delayed based on it’s importance. So instead of Sunday news printing something that happened Saturday, this model prints about the Saturday event two weeks later on a Tuesday when all the facts are known. But it doesn’t have to be every day.

The hard part is that I don’t just want this for myself, I want this for everyone that is currently captured by the toxic 24/7 9/11-style news cycle. The society is in a permanent panic/outrage mode. Breaking that will be tough.

[duriandurian]

Cool, I like that it's just links. Actually reminds me of Arbtr, an ultra minimalist curation platform http://www.arbtr.com

[jonplackett]

I like this - but where can I find some info about how it works / who is choosing the articles?

[nickthemagicman]

This is basically the Atlantic.