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:

• Global warming
• A father killing himself over a school place
• The Austrian cellar nightmare
• Gordon Brown and the 42-day internment plan
• Boris Johnson "wooing" the LibDems
• Ian McKellen returning as Gandalf
• Chelsea v. Liverpool
• Manchester United v. Barcelona
• Shoaib's failed appeal
• House prices sliding again
• Calls for a "supermarket Tsar"
• BSkyB's "secret weapon"
• Toll roads - Britain needs more of them
• Gordon Brown and the 10p tax rate fiasco
• The price of progress in Beijing
• A tasy recipe to get to your table in 10 minutes

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:

• Global warming
• School admissions and the stress they cause
• The Austrian cellar nightmare
• 42-day internment
• The London Mayoral election
• The remaking of the Hobbit
• Chelsea v. Liverpool
• Manchester Utd. v Barcelona
• The Champions League
• Shoaib's cricket ban
• House prices
• Supermarket regulation
• BSkyB
• Digital TV competition in Britain
• Tax in Britain
• Poverty in Britain
• Gordon Brown
• China
• Recipes

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?

Serious journalism was described at the conference, repeatedly, as something like broccoli, or medicine the citizenry needs to spoon down, no matter how unpalatable, if democracy is to survive. That’s despite the fact investigative, or civic, journalism is still seen inside the industry as being at the top end of what we do. Yet I struggle to think of another industry that views its premium product as something akin to a nasty cough syrup - necessary, good for your health, but irredeemably foul-tasting.

Indeed. Remember when journalism used to be fun as well as important? Hair shirts off, please.

But it did make me think - again - that people in Britain over the age of, say, 35, are in the main not using this stuff. And then I found this on my RSS reader this morning: MetzMash: 89% of Your Customers Don't Blog:

So, based on the aggregation of the Forrester studies from 2007, based on the United States, here are the key take-aways that I have, about our social media use, on average:

75% of your customers don't read blogs
89% of your customers don't write a blog, either
71% of your customers don't watch user-generated content
75% of your customers don't visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook)
82% of your customers don't participate in discussion forums
75% of your customers don't read online ratings or reviews
89% of your customers don't post online ratings or reviews
92% of your customers don't use RSS

And this is in America. In Britain, I reckon those numbers are even bigger, and for the over-35s, even bigger again. Worth thinking about.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

This trend away from gatekeepers and towards social networks is not a new idea, of course, but the importance of the Times piece is perhaps the extent to which it has already happened - and the extent to which it is driving engagement. The piece makes the point that the Democrat nomination race has attracted a lot of attention among young people, and it is perhaps dangerous to see the present, unique, political moment as the start of a long-term shift. But it's also true that in Britain the reemergence of the right wing has seen the start of a similar movement, albeit on a smaller scale, led by successful right-wing bloggers. And for news organisations, here's the money quote:

Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

Marrying search with storytelling: Digital advertising has largely been focused on search, while traditional advertising has been about condensing a narrative about a product into a 30-second TV commercial, a page in a magazine or newspaper, or a billboard. Among Maheu's goals when he took the job at Ogilvy last year was to bring the art of storytelling to interactive advertising: "One of the key things we're working on is how to engage with Yahoo, Google and MSN in a way that is creative, unique and that is a bit more strategic than just buying media."

The notion of "telling stories" through advertising seems to me to be fundamental to the business of selling stuff to people. And it seems it must be particularly hard to do through search advertising (so why are Ogilvy only talking to GYM about it?). Advertising through "social media" seems to be all about telling stories. Which is maybe why Bebo went for as much as it did.

Hotel Babylon star Max Beesley today accepted a formal apology and "substantial" damages from gossip website Popbitch at London's High Court.

The actor sued after Popbitch Ltd claimed in its weekly celebrity gossip e-mail to members that he had lined up three women for sex at a TV industry party in Cannes.

In the 11 October issue of the e-mail, which is sent to roughly 360,000 people, it was also claimed that Beesley told one woman who had turned him down to go away so he could find someone else.

Is this the first time an online-only publication has paid out "substantial" damages - without bankrupting itself?