Is it time to slow down the news, asks Journalism.co.uk

Slowly (why of course!) but surely, the “slow news movement” is becoming part of the media conversation. This week, online magazine Journalism.co.uk dedicated a podcast to the question “Is is time to slow down the news?”

It features Newstapes and De Correspondent, but also more recent players to the game, like The Charta founders Carolina Are and Charles-Edouard van de Put. They just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their “slow news magazine”, that would wait for events to unfold before starting to cover them.

The Charta and De Correspondent are both exploring an interesting territory as they are trying to prove that “slow news” does not equal putting out a weekly magazine but really is more about redesigning the content for the age of the permanent update. Listen here.

Peter Laufer calls for “slow news revolution”

“It’s ok to read yesterday’s news tomorrow”, writes journalist and author Peter Laufer in a column published by the Oregonian. In it, the James Wallace chair in journalism at the University of Oregon details how our relationship to food and news are close:

We must eat in order to survive. Accurate information can be another requirement for our survival. Yet our quest for instant information has made it more difficult to find the truth and see the larger picture behind breaking events.

A realization that dawned on him with the recent mass shooting in Newtown :

When news is an important element of our societal curriculum, as in the case of the Newtown story, we should shun fragments and wait for detailed reports and thoughtful analysis once critical facts are ascertained.

Now is the time to “question the value of the perpetual fast-food-like empty-calories news that is processed to keep us addicted to it”, because some good might come out of “ruminating” more. I so agree.

This way, please, to his full column.

More on Peter Laufer.