I thought the new Addictomatic might be one answer to my request for slower news, but it doesn't work for me because it organises content by its source. It really doesn't matter to me that a story comes from ask.com or Technorati, so why arrange it like that? Why not arrange all that stuff by, say, format, or date, or relevance?
If we can have slow food, why can't we have slow news? Why does everything around news have to be fast?
The "slow food" movement treats food as something to be cherished, something to spend time with. Our appreciation and understanding of what food is increases with the time we spend with it. "Slows news" would see us organising our news sites in a way to allow attention to be given to a news story over time, rather than just at the instant at which it is producing the brightest light. To some extent, the rise of the blogosphere has already given us this facility, but it's diffuse and depends on additional tools and services - RSS readers, Google alerts, Twitter, whatever - to give an individual access to it. So why don't newspaper sites provide for slow news?
Take, for instance, the front page of the Telegraph. No particular reason to pick on the Telegraph, I just plucked it from the air. As I write this, the following stories are being covered in one way or another:
And that's just the stuff above the fold. Now, many of these represent a "story space" in which events will unfold. Some of these "story spaces" might even make sense as a navigational entity, say a "topic" page. Off the top of my head I'd say we've got the following "story spaces" represented in here:
See the problem? From an IA perspective these are all over the place. Global warming, house prices and 42-day internment are all obvious topic pages. But what "level" should the Shoaib cricket ban on? And what's the best way to organise all the coverage around an individual football match? From a human perspective, these story spaces make perfect sense. I'd love the Telegraph to provide me a single destination on, for instance, supermarket regulation. And I'd love that page to include a bit more than just the most recent stories that fall into that area. I'd love it to include some analysis, some data, some stuff from the web. I'd love it to be "slow." Which causes another problem. Who does that editing? And how is the page maintained and updated?
Some sites, notably the NY Times, are using "topics" to provide a kind of slow news experience. But for me these topic pages are simply dressed up archives. They do of course provide a valuable service, both to the user and to the site publisher in the form of SEO. But they're not necessarily all that pleasing as media experiences.
I think this "slow news" idea is one reason why Wikipedia's coverage of news events is often so attractive. Firstly, Wikipedia provides a single and persistent URL around a story (which newspapers sites often, notably, do not do). Then that page starts to develop and grow. Information starts to attach itself to the URL. The page's informational value increases at least partly because it's a single page. And, of course, because of the nature of Wikipedia the "maintenance" question comes pre-answered.
Where's the newspaper equivalent? I'm not sure I know. But I do think it's worthy of consideration. At the moment, something happens and newspaper sites shine a bright, searing spotlight onto it. We get a tight, focussed dose of detail. And then the spotlight moves on to something else. If the original subject comes back into the news, we shine the spotlight onto it once more, and we often get the same detail or maybe a bit more. The problem is, to see the whole of a topic, we need some light shining on it all the time. A random series of superbright spotlights gives us a distorted picture of what we're looking at.
So, slow news and consistent light. Maybe I should tag a few IA types to give some thoughts on this?
Today is a sad day. Today's the day I turned off Paul Krugman and Freakonomics in my RSS reader.
Not because the stuff those guys write isn't any good. Far from it. It's just that the NY Times adopts a stupid, blunt cut-off strategy on their RSS feeds, so I only ever get a truncated slice of meaningless prose.
Why do people do this? When we launched our blogs at MessyMedia, we did take the decision to cut short longer posts, because we want to get the balance right between encouraging RSS readers (where we don't make any money) and clickthroughs to the site (where we do). I guess about one in every three posts is cut short with the extended text on the site.
But the point is we make an editorial decision to cut the text short. We do it, for instance, at the end of a para, not halfway through a sentence. By the time you get to the jump, you know if you want to read on or not and, crucially, you know what the stories about.
Not so with the NY Times feeds. They're cut off short, mechanically and in their prime. It's particularly stupid because the whole point of blogs for a newspaper site is to allow a more discursive, free-flowing style. In other words, the point of the story might not be in the first sentence, as with a traditional news story. It might not come around to the second or third para. So I never seem to get enough data to decide whether to click through to the full story. So I never do. So I'm killing the feeds.
Shame, really. I'll miss Krazy Krugman (I'm A Liberal, Me!) and Dilettante Dubner (See How This Baggage Carousel Says Something About The Human Condition).
