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:

• 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?

Why the glum share story for newspapers? - Times Online :

Something is not right here. You can buy Johnston shares today at eight times this year’s profits on a business that requires minimal capital investment with monopoly brands dotted all around the country. Nor is Johnston exceptional. If you like the Daily Mail, you can buy one of the bits that Viscount Rothermere does not own for ten times this year’s profits; the Daily Mirror, and its parent company, are available at eight times too.

This is cheap, ludicrously cheap. We all know what the Barclay twins paid for The Daily Telegraph; £665 million for a paper that made underlying profits of £30 million to £40 million. Valued on the same basis as Johnston Press (ie, after tax), it would have been more like £160 million - and the difference cannot be accounted for simply because the bragging rights in owning the Telegraph (dinner with the Queen, if desired) are greater than for The Scotsman.

Interesting context from the Times (disclaimer: the Times is a newspaper!). There is still a *lot* of money being made in British newspapers. So why the endless waves of negativity? Personally, I think this piece does overdo it on the positive side, but there does seem to be a stereotypically British story in here - one in which businesses decline, a lot of people shrug, a lot more people weep, and a very small number of people make a great deal of money. Richard Desmond paid £125 million for the Express; he has paid himself £166 million in the last four years, according to this Times piece. Nice work if you can get it.

As reported here and by my old boss Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, the New York Times has finally decided to end its two-year experiment in subscription web content, TimesSelect.

As an avid reader of the Times columnists who were behind the pay wall and an occasional user of the Times archives (plus a crossword junkie), I was one of the 272,000 or so people who was willing to pay the $50 (£25) per year for access to the likes of Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. But even though I made the calculation that the content was worth paying for (or at least paying less for than a daily copy of the International Herald Tribune, where these columns and crosswords also run), the Times made the calculation that it was harming their business overall by limiting their distribution on popular search engines.

Jarvis writes:

TimesSelect’s brilliant cynicism was that, when forced to find something to put behind a pay wall, they came up with content that was, indeed, uniquely valuable — the columnists and archives. But this was also content for which there was no significant ad revenue at the time (advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather). Thus they made the good college try to prove whether or not a pay news service could work without harming the ad revenue of the business. Even so, TimesSelect hurt the larger brand and its position in the marketplace, in the conversation, and in Google. It was a short-sighted strategy.

A short-sighted strategy, indeed. Mickey Kaus of Slate has been waging a crusade against TimesSelect for as long as the idea's been in the public domain. If you can read between the gloats below, he makes a point about the Times' arrogance that I find particularly salient given the business we're embarking on:

TimesSelect -- Pinch Sulzberger's attempt to put his prized columnists behind a subscription wall on the theory that they were so much better than free bloggers that people would pay for them -- is finally so doomed it's actually dead, dead, dead, as of midnight tomorrow.

But from my perspective, this decision reflects more than the dollars and cents that may have served as its basis. It's a reflection that the "communities" we refer to on the web really extend beyond the walls of any one site. The internet, itself, is the community, and the extent to which a piece of writing provokes a (reasoned) response anywhere is a pretty good measure of its worth. We may measure things in page views and unique users, but the interconnectedness of things makes it matter less, to a degree, where the response is posted. If you respond elsewhere to what I have to say, chances are that will pay a return of some sort by way of making my comments easier to find.