Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

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sspeerer about 20 hours ago 176 commentsRead Article on slow-journalism.com

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openasocket•about 18 hours ago

One thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes from other officials/politicians saying the opposite. As an example, how many times has the strait of Hormuz been declared open by the US, when it turns out it really wasn't? And every time these low-effort articles just echo that statement without even trying to evaluate if that is true. I mean, the transponder data on shipping is publicly available, there's a dozen websites you could use to actually see passage through the strait to verify the claim. If you don't do even the most basic follow ups, is that even a news article? Or is it just a more elaborate form of re-tweeting?

BeetleB•about 15 hours ago

How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?

News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:

1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)

2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online

Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.

josephg•about 14 hours ago

Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people.

Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.

I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.

coatmatter•about 13 hours ago

Whenever I encounter someone who jumps at the first opportunity to criticise "mainstream media", I ask them what their preferred outlets are. I tend to not get a response, which to me is quite telling.

Jensson•about 5 hours ago

> News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:

The primary reason is the click metrics, they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs.

It doesn't matter how much you pay for it when they will just invest more into those things. You can see this in gaming, the more people paid for Ubisoft games the more toxic transactions Ubisoft put into them.

gnz11•6 minutes ago

> they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs.

No, that’s not a new phenomenon. Tabloids and political rags filled that market well before the Internet. News organizations aren’t static entities, they come in a wide variety of flavors.

inigyou•about 2 hours ago

99% of everything is crap, even the ones you pay for. Some are good and worth supporting, like 404 Media.

everything is broadly declining, too, as we grow up taking it for granted while the older generation retires, and we also are too busy working menial jobs to pay the rent.

abofh•about 11 hours ago

I would love to pay a penny an article read by me my AI or whatever to a host of services provided they could prove the value first. These days I'm told which thousand companies my clicks will be sold to any time I visit an article, and that's before I've gotten value.

The industry got it wrong when it digitized

katzgrau•about 1 hour ago

Plenty of startups have tried the “penny per article” approach and failed. They might get 20% of the penny on behalf of the publisher - who has to get 1M pageviews to get $10k.

Hard to build a business that requires changing user behavior on pennies. Seriously, make the math and strategy work - requires a Herculean effort to hit ramen profitability for all involved.

slickdork•about 11 hours ago

I suspect the third reason might be that most media is owned by a handful of people. If there's no money in news, why are these companies owned by billionaires?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...

zhivota•about 11 hours ago

There's not much money to be made by doing quality news, but plenty to be made in click bait crap news.

And if you're a billionaire there's a lot of intangible value in owning news outlets.

leonidasrup•about 7 hours ago

News organizations have been in decline for a few decades, but the relationship of news organizations with the current US goverment has been shaped by the current president.

"Donald Trump frequently attacks the American media as having a left-wing bias and being "corrupt", and also uses a variety of insults when speaking about outlets that give him unfavorable coverage. Trump has sued various media outlets for perceived inaccuracies or biases, and has used his position as president to pressure outlets he dislikes by interfering in their business operations, launching investigations, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and cutting funding for public broadcasting."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_conflict_with...

lynx97•about 6 hours ago

I life in a country where we have a mandatory monthly fee for the state-run media outlet. Its roughly 2x a youtube premium. And quality of said outlet is still declining with everyone else. Pretty non-critical reporting, basically forwarding of what others have claimed. Typos, questionable headlines which get corrected half an hour later. I refute your claim. Its not about financing. Journalists have just become very lazy. Mainstream media deserves the same "I vote with my wallet" treatment as everyone else. And the state forcing me to pay for a specific outlet is just so broken, I am questioning the sanity of our politicians. But lobbying helps I guess. Instead of doing a good/great job, the new tactics is to insist that "you" are an indispensible part of democracy, even though you aren't doing any critical reporting anymore...

wolvoleo•about 9 hours ago

We have plenty of state funded public news services in Europe but they do the same. Just shallow Reuters copy paste slop.

The real deep dives are hard to find.

And I don't think only money brings quality. Hobbyists tend to do great work especially because they're not making money. For them quality can be a goal. Not getting the most money with the least amount of effort.

A lot of the content and software I value most is by people who are doing it just for fun or because they care.

And the newspaper world in particular was oversaturated. Every little town had one or more local dailies. That was never sustainable in the digital age.

cyanydeez•about 14 hours ago

you dropped 3. its more valuable to pay for propaganda

protocolture•about 10 hours ago

>How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?

I mean as an Australian taxpayer I am partly funding the ABC. And its following the exact same trends.

Todays crop of journalists are more likely to repeat absurd claims from social media as true, and shop around among experts to find the one that will support the crazy assertions.

I send more letters to the editor and to politicians today than ever before. Its getting stupid.

bch•about 14 hours ago

I don't know what qualifies as "mainstream media" here, but I feel various public broadcasters have served me well over the years: CBC[0] in Canada, BBC[1] in United Kingdom, NPR[2] in America, ABC[3] in Australia, NHK[4] in Japan... switching around the world also gives reprieve from local politics letting you tune into someone else's local politics practically recreationally, which seems more and more necessary in the modern world of today. Streaming radio is one of the best things about the contemporary internet.

[0] https://cbc.ca/

[1] https://bbc.com/

[2] https://npr.org/

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/

[4] https://www.nhk.or.jp/

daniel_iversen•about 12 hours ago

The ABC in Australia feels so opinionated and tilted to the “left” side of politics whenever I’ve watched it on the TV. And it may just have been that news show or the specific host but it makes it not enjoyable to watch when it seems there’s always an “angle” and negative undertones and people constantly having an axe to grind. I’d personally like a bit more neutral news that also leans a little more on the positive and inspiring side.

SturgeonsLaw•about 11 hours ago

It's "just a blog", but if you're after positive and uplifting, that does exist

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/

I like to check this every so often as a palette cleanser for the endless bad news that is available elsewhere

protocolture•about 9 hours ago

>The ABC in Australia feels so opinionated and tilted to the “left” side of politics whenever I’ve watched it on the TV. And it may just have been that news show or the specific host but it makes it not enjoyable to watch when it seems there’s always an “angle” and negative undertones and people constantly having an axe to grind. I’d personally like a bit more neutral news that also leans a little more on the positive and inspiring side.

I dont see any bias in their journalism, but they have a tendency to just accept everything at face value. They will also shop around for experts that support their opinions. One person will write an article about housing referring to housing experts, and get one view, and then a few years later another will instead quote a public housing expert getting another view. Theres never any "Lets test the quality of each expert and try and figure out whats true"

4 corners and foreign correspondant however are still absolute top tier journalism. Its a shame they dont apply those standards everywhere.

apparent•about 9 hours ago

I used to listen to and read NPR. Since about 2015 they've been slipping, and at an increasing rate. After submitting several corrections, none of which were heeded, I have stopped taking them seriously. An outlet that does not correct clear-cut falsehoods is peddling a narrative, not reporting news.

DrewADesign•about 16 hours ago

I was glad to see a bit of a decline in the “Worrying Trend: (a dozen) People (on Twitter) are saying [controversial thing]!” type of articles filter down through whatever algorithm I was subject to at the moment, but notes they’ve just replaced it with TikTok.

Gigachad•about 12 hours ago

This always felt like way to work around libel laws. Where they can claim "People on twitter are saying x", as an indirect way of making a claim without having to be liable for it.

jchw•about 15 hours ago

I swear to God there are articles on news sites (glorified blogs, but you know) that are along the lines of "people on twitter are saying this" and then if you actually look there is literally one (or perhaps two if you're lucky) person saying it and their post isn't even that popular. It's not that I'm surprised it's just that I know 98-99% of people are just going to take that at face value, and either allow it to confirm their pre-existing notions, or perhaps they will see it and shake their heads disapprovingly. I think this over time leads to people having distorted views of sentiment on issues, sometimes leading to really weird situations where literally most people disagree but nobody wants to be the one to say it.

ggregoryarms•about 15 hours ago

Yeah it really flips things upside down when a journalist has so much access to info that they can essentially pick their own story from the data.

Maybe they can't credibly fudge the numbers, but they can find enough data to agenda-set pretty much anything.

DrewADesign•about 15 hours ago

Yeah it’s really just depressing. It’s like every news outlet wants to be just a ‘little bit’ “national enquirer” but still have everyone take them seriously. Our news industry is abjectly sensationalist.

dmoy•about 18 hours ago

This is not exactly a new criticism. See e.g. Fisk's complaint from decades ago r.e. "US Officials Say"

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...

andy_ppp•about 16 hours ago

How can we measure if things are worse now? Potentially asking/training an LLM on news stories from different eras might be a fairer comparison than human intelligence at this point.

avaer•about 6 hours ago

Look at how many times the current government has tried to shut down reporting that didn't tow the current party line. Selective access, prosecutions, lawsuits, threats to block mergers, comedians being cancelled while the administration cheers, there's a (s)hitlist of journalists on the whitehouse site, etc.

It probably has something to do with the decline of quality journalism.

jaredwiener•about 14 hours ago

For what its worth, I'm a former journalist looking to automate this. Getting on those newsmaking lists, and automating the rest.

Free, consumer website: https://www.forth.news Paid site with custom notifications and feeds: https://pro.forth.news

rambambram•about 13 hours ago

Your 'personal' site in your bio is giving me a browser-warning not to visit. Maybe expired certificate?

Btw, nice initiative with Forth! That's why I clicked.

jaredwiener•about 13 hours ago

Thank you!

Looks like I didn’t rotate my certificate. Eek

grvdrm•about 13 hours ago

Neat. Bookmarking to revisit. Does your team do any headline writing and or manual section? Your site reminds me of Techmeme.

jaredwiener•about 13 hours ago

Right now, no.

The Pro site is all self-curated by the user, and forth.news is a series of LLMs doing grouping, summarization/headline writing, measuring urgency, categorization, etc.

partyficial•about 6 hours ago

> half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort

that is EXACTLY what i want in news.

i do not want your summarization opinion out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet.

just be a parrot.

avaer•about 6 hours ago

Parroting seems like the same thing ("out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet"), except without any checks or oversight.

fyltr•about 17 hours ago

isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases. Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y. Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-depth research and risking your own rep every time you put more than 'facts' out there just don't give any incentive to do more than pick out the quotes you want to use.

TuringTest•about 16 hours ago

> isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'?

Neutral journalism is not presenting the claims of all opposing parties, it's fact-checking the claims of both sides without a bias for any of them.

If one party says the truth and the other side is not, it's still neutral to repeat only the claims of the first one.

pzxc•about 15 hours ago

Exactly. As the saying goes, if one side says it's raining and the other side says it's not, it's not the job of the journalist to report both. It's the job of the journalist to look out the fucking window to see if it's really raining or not.

sixtyj•about 16 hours ago

> a need for immediate reporting

This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.

Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.

This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.

ericjmorey•about 14 hours ago

"current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases"

The facts chosen to include in a report are chosen with bias. There's no neutral subset of facts about any event.

goatlover•about 6 hours ago

That view tends toward sophistry and relativism. It can't be true that no event has a neutral subset of facts. If I'm reporting on some discovery in astronomy or math, what biased facts would I be choosing? There would need to be some sort of controversy about the discovery where choosing some subset of the facts supports one side over the other. But this assumes both sides have an equal claim on the facts, which is often not the case.

And while humans can't be without bias, there is a big difference between trying to be factual while leaving your biases aside, and having an agenda or outright reporting propaganda.

dfxm12•about 15 hours ago

No. Knowingly reporting lies (including lies by omission) isn't "neutral".

watwut•about 16 hours ago

> isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'?

Yes.

> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases

No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.

lovich•about 17 hours ago

I’ve also seen a trend of news organizations sane washing statements when they are too crazy, which is modifying the facts. Take this AP news article for instance[1].

I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”

That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container

[1] https://apnews.com/article/correspondents-dinner-trump-shoot...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/democrats-senate-fisa-trump-pulte...

[3] https://apnews.com/article/california-tank-leak-explosion-ga...

safety1st•about 9 hours ago

I think a lot of it has to do with the desire and pressure to publish as fast as possible. Online, EVERYTHING is rushed and even published before the facts are known. The story may or may not get updated as the situation develops.

Outside of tech because it affects my work, I've stopped reading online news altogether. There's a bookstore down the road from me which sells the daily and weekend editions of a couple papers. On a slow weekend I'll walk over there, buy the weekend edition of some reputable paper, and peruse it over coffee. The stories are invariably better than anything I see online, as well as in the daily editions. None of this stuff is urgent. I don't need up to the minute. I just need to kill some time, preferably with higher quality information.

Honestly the old ways were better in this case. Just stop reading online news. Grab a weekend edition of a paper when you're bored instead. Couple bucks. No subscription. Better. They haven't changed much.

dfxm12•about 15 hours ago

I suspect this is more due to cost cutting and the fact that context would likely paint the people who own these media outlets in a bad light. Keeping their readers underinformed is win-win for them.

like_any_other•about 14 hours ago

> regurgitated without any additional effort.

Wrong. Great effort goes into ensuring only the desired statements are regurgitated, and the undesirable ones omitted: https://www.foxnews.com/media/ap-report-slain-north-dakota-t...

This is not a cherry-picked example, but the policy of most major media, explicitly outlined in their style guides: https://jfulford.substack.com/p/hiding-the-race-of-criminals...

Computer0•about 14 hours ago

I follow the New York Times, as well as being an avid news follower and have found them to be of poor reporting quality a handful of times over the past year.

Funes-•about 16 hours ago

>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline

Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.

nakedneuron•about 6 hours ago

Isn't it also true that a quick buck can be made on the stock market with these news?

Now Trump offers privileged access to his "tweets" for money.

Late stage capitalism indeed.

munk-a•about 17 hours ago

It turns out there are a few stories that are important to be immediately aware of (declarations of war, local events like service outages or celebration - and only if they're planned with short notice). Most of the rest of the news is important for the purpose of holding people to account but outside the influence of regular people.

We can live in a society where a massive scandal happens and it takes two months for the systems and mechanisms to respond to it. I genuinely believe that most stories are better delivered with full information and nuance well after the event occurs than immediately.

smoe•about 17 hours ago

15 years after making the decision, while working for a major news outlet, to no longer read “the news,” I can pretty confidently say: if something is important enough for you to know, it will reach you eventually anyway.

Consuming news has little to do with being informed. Quite the opposite, at times.

djeastm•about 2 hours ago

>if something is important enough for you to know, it will reach you eventually anyway

Through a friend or family member who's been watching the news?

regexorcist•about 14 hours ago

6 or 7 years here, no news or socials. I keep telling people the same thing, you find out about the important stuff real quick regardless. The rest is noise and rage bait.

ChrisRR•about 4 hours ago

It's sad how effective rage bait is on many people, and how oblivious they are to it.

watwut•about 16 hours ago

I have seen people who don't follow news confidently say fairly absurd things. They tend to assume things are kind of like they were those 15 years ago and don't want to believe a party of or a country or a situation could have change in the meantime.

It is fairly maddening when you know what they say is completely inconsistent with what was happening.

smoe•about 15 hours ago

I wonder, do those people you talk about also happen to avoid the other forms of journalism, such as investigative reporting, analysis, essays, documentaries, books, and long-form features in general?

Those are the things among many others that actually make you informed about the world, in my opinion, not the news feed.

BeetleB•about 15 hours ago

I used to be somewhat of a news junkie.

When life finally happened, I had to force myself to "slow" down. By "slow" I don't mean read less news, but rather I'd dedicate a week a month for catching up to the prior month's news (via RSS, etc).

And that's where I learned the same lesson as you: It's better to read about a news event a month or so after the actual event. The first few days is mostly speculation, and it's best not to get rumors in your head. Seeing all those articles at once makes it easy to glean what did and didn't happen. Seeing them piecemeal over a month made it harder.

(I don't bother with news any more, but that lesson stuck with me).

amelius•about 3 hours ago

We need a hippocratic oath for ethical journalism.

And we need to stop taking anyone seriously who doesn't abide by it.

Kick them out of mainstream media if necessary.

para_parolu•about 12 hours ago

The problem is that sometimes declaration of war means bombs are falling on your head. Or you are drafted. Sometimes you want to be a bit ahead of big news.

ChrisRR•about 4 hours ago

My anxiety levels were massively reduced when I stopped reading the news years back, including blocking any "top story" sidebars, unsubbing from major subreddits.

Sure I'm late to finding out some important information, but it's better than every piece of news that doesn't personally affect me being treated as if it's a world ending event that I must know about right now

piker•about 17 hours ago

Nassim Taleb has a note about this idea in one of his books. Essentially just pointing out how unimportant most news headlines are a few years out.

bandofthehawk•about 15 hours ago

If you are interested, Daniel Boorstin wrote about similar ideas much earlier in The Image.

exq•about 1 hour ago

Another one: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

BrenBarn•about 17 hours ago

The other thing is that I find a fair number of "news" stories these days are basically one or two small details about the latest update on some ongoing situation, followed by a long summary of what happened before. So most of the news is already old.

petercooper•about 19 hours ago

I was subscribed to this. It's beautifully designed, well written, good paper stock, the works. If the idea appeals to you, it's worth trying.

Ultimately, it didn't work for me, but that's my fault. Despite my best intentions, it turned out I wasn't interested in reading about world affairs beyond the news cycle.

Seattle3503•about 19 hours ago

Did they show the same news as everyone, but later? That seems like it doesn't fully leverage the format. The format seems like it would be good for things that are subtle and got overlooked at the time. But I guess maybe the normal news cycle can surface those same things when they reach a breaking point.

pavon•about 8 hours ago

I disagree. I think there are quite a few weekly/monthly papers that focus on long-form dives on select topics, like the print versions of the Economist, Atlantic, Harper, etc. However, I found that when I was using them as my main source of news I would have large gaps in my awareness of important events that had occurred. I felt like those magazines were best as a supplement, not a replacement - but I'm not a news junkie and was trying to decrease the time spent reading the news without being uninformed. They weren't helpful in that regard (exception - Economist was good enough summary of international news, but not domestic).

I really do just want the same news, condensed and distilled, instead of blow-by-blow details padded to maximize engagement, and I haven't found it anywhere.

Edit: I see Delayed Gratification is quarterly which is probably too delayed to replace primary news and better suited for supplementary deep dives.

petercooper•about 17 hours ago

It's been several years (and the issues are in my office so I could take a look later) but I recall it was a mix. They'd sometimes group big stories together thematically (like when all the billionaires were starting to get into space) but also do longer-term reflections on single, complex stories like the Salisbury Novichok incident.

I don't recall it really surfacing things that didn't make the news cycle, but one thing I failed to mention is they had (have?) really good infographics/visualizations! They have a lot of the more recent ones here https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/infographics

nzealand•about 12 hours ago

This is exactly correct. Here is what the latest issue covers:

His exfiltration of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was swift, effective and - as we found in our follow-up reporting - surprisingly popular among Venezuelans (plo). But then the 47th president threw himself into a new venture, a major attack on Iran. Far from being a surgical strike à la Caracas, it rapidly spiralled into a regional conflagration which threatened to blast the global economy off its hinges. We have analysed the build-up and fall-out of the Iran war in forensic detail in an infographic extravaganza (p70). While Trump loomed large throughout the quarter, adding an Ice operation in Minneapolis (p30) and unseemly wranglings over Greenland (p50) into the headline-grabbing mix, his was not the only game in town. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested (P66), a football final turned into theatrical chaos (p40), the power of Al gave hope to sufferers of ultra-rare diseases (p80) and victory was declared over ferrets on a Northern Irish island (p100). Meanwhile Nasa scientists announced fascinating revelations drawn from their analysis of a thimbleful of space dust obtained at great expense from a four billion-year-old asteroid (p56).

edit: you can see some samples on their website: https://www.slow-journalism.com/back-issue/62-jan-mar-2026

wavemode•about 19 hours ago

The target audience of this doesn't appear to be people who don't like reading the news. But rather people who like reading journalism that has perspective and nuance (which tend to improve when you take your time to let a story fully develop before writing about it).

jihadjihad•about 12 hours ago

I subscribed for a year, but like a sibling comment said, it was too focused on Commonwealth news and culture to be worth my time.

It was however entertaining to receive in the mail, inside a nice form-fitting cardboard box with Royal Mail elegantly stamped on it.

parpfish•about 19 hours ago

the twenty-four hour news cycle's unyielding need for urgent content has broken many people psychologically and we need to 'deprogram' them.

i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"

Brendinooo•about 19 hours ago

I just wanna throw in that Tangle News[0] strikes a pretty good balance here. Their core offering is detailed breakdowns of what is generally regarded as the top four stories of the week, one a day from Monday through Thursday, which is usually more than enough space to keep you "up on current events", and they usually (though not always) tend to give enough space to let stories develop before summarizing.

They're a good fit on your "one week" timescale.

[0]: https://www.readtangle.com/

T1ny•about 19 hours ago

Agreed, they've been a boon for me.

dd8601fn•about 19 hours ago

The objective here feels like a good candidate for people to vibecode into their homebrew rss readers, in a composite feed. The marked source feeds then get hidden behind a minor effort gate. You still keep your unmarked and “safe” xkcd or whatever feeds as siblings.

foobar_______•about 18 hours ago

Agreed. The 24 hour news and social media with our brightest phds learning to drain all attention from you have broken and radicalized our society.

parpfish•about 18 hours ago

our brightest phds are attacking attention from all fronts (ads, social media, news), but the news one in particular is particularly insidious because for years you were told that watching the news made you a good, responsible person. but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.

People that get sucked into social media srolling for hours know that they're not doing something good for themselves, people are guzzling from the fear-monger newshose and they think they're doing something "healthy".

cruffle_duffle•about 17 hours ago

“ but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.”

There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.

ArekDymalski•about 16 hours ago

that is really interesting idea. I'd be really happy to read such a site, as I very often wonder if current hype/prediction will be relevant in the future. But I always forget to check being flooded by more hype.

What would you need to start such a project?

colechristensen•about 19 hours ago

A well informed population is important. The problem is they're not well informed they're well-hooked to whatever exaggeration and drama the news can whip up.

The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.

ReactiveJelly•about 18 hours ago

"hooked" is right.

I'm trying to tell people, you have to take initiative, you have to have agency and be responsible for your own attention.

If you are being "fed" from a "feed" you are being fattened for slaughter

cachvico•about 18 hours ago

https://www.verity.news/ might be interesting for you; they try to show you both sides of the spin.

petrev01•about 1 hour ago

Current subscriber and big fan here! I honestly just wish they would dial down the infographics and bring a few more long form articles each magazine.

abound•about 19 hours ago

I've been building something similar for my own purposes. Basically, I use Calibre's "Fetch News" functionality to get epubs of all the news sources I trust, and then once a month (interval is configurable), I run a pipeline over all of it (some LLM magic, partly local partly API) to dedupe and rank stories, then compile it into an actual honest-to-goodness newspaper (using Typst for layout and stuff), then read that at my leisure.

jonathanlb•about 15 hours ago

I ran a similar personal project where weekly I scraped a country's news stories across curated sources using Brave News API and used an LLM to dedupe and cluster stories. This got expensive fast, so I'm wondering what your approach is to keep costs down across what I imagine is a lot of volume, i.e., one months' worth of stories across several sources.

sheesdev•about 17 hours ago

This sounds really interesting and something I'd love to try. Do you have more details on how someone else can utilise this?

abound•about 16 hours ago

Not yet, but I'll see if I can publish the basics for it this week.

kristerv•about 19 hours ago

The what now. But not all sources have epubs, right? Is there any one that you're missing now?

advisedwang•about 19 hours ago

Calibre has a feature that will fetch a rss feed or (IIRC) scrape a site and make an epub from it.

abound•about 19 hours ago

Nope! Every source I care about either has an RSS feed, or I've been able to make a custom recipe [1] to handle things like auth for paid sites and whatnot.

[1] https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/glossary.html#term-recipe

imhoguy•about 19 hours ago

epub is ZIP with HTML+CSS+images+some metadata.

kridsdale3•about 19 hours ago

In this spirit, I prefer to not read any online news, or daily newspaper, but the weekly Economist in print. It has higher quality writing than all the rest, has a built in capacitor buffer against high frequency low signal bullshit (noise) by virtue of being weekly, and contains all the information about the world that mattered in that time period. Zero engagement bait because it's an expensive subscription.

thegrim33•about 17 hours ago

I haven't read or engaged in mainstream media in over 15 years now. I just pulled up the Economist website for fun to see what's on it. I see stories that have absolutely nothing to do with me or the country (e.g. an article gushing about how China managed to stop massively polluting one of their rivers. In what universe is that remotely relevant to me? Why is this the front page story?), I see the typical biased articles and bias in choosing what to report on, everything all biased politically the same way (of course, if you hold the same biases then you don't see the bias, it all just just looks normal/neutral/true to you), I see stories increasing the fear and hate in the world (China has a scary secretive shadowy maritime militia! Oil markets are scary right now! Be afraid!), there's absolutely nothing of interest to me. Guess I'll go another 15.

probst•about 18 hours ago

I have been a long time subscriber to the economist for the same reason. The print edition is great and keeps me feeling informed. If only it wouldn’t include the digital edition too… Invariably, the more stressed I get in my everyday life by work and small children and lack of sleep, the more I get dragged towards the online edition of the economist, and BAM I’m back in the constant instant news cycle again, even though the site doesn’t update that often.

My latest life hack which I can recommend to anyone, at least in Germany: as part of my local library membership I get access to the PressReader app, which gives me access to the print edition of the economist! At 10 EUR a year it’s so affordable it nearly feels like it’s unethically so for what I get. I guess I’ll close with: May we forever be blessed with libraries, and may they never be „optimised away“ as an unnecessary social good.

the_sleaze_•about 16 hours ago

I found the Economist to be a liberal rag. I mean that respectfully, and it has been a number of years since I've bothered to pick one up so maybe it has changed. I know people who I respect that read every issue cover to cover.

A newspaper called The Economist should not take a hyper-critical view of conservatism or right-leaning politics across the globe, and hyper-liberal views about decisions leaders are making. I do not need my morals being shaped by my news outlet - full stop.

I find the Week and the Financial Times to be significantly better.

rconti•about 14 hours ago

I haven't subscribed to the Economist in 15 years but I'm considering re-subscribing. We used to get The Week as a gift, but it was just WAY too surface-level and "both sides-y".

benoliver999•about 14 hours ago

FT is great. The Week I just cannot get on with the style of writing.

koyote•about 14 hours ago

Why not read both FT and the Economist?

Both are well written and well researched and although they both take an ulta-capitalist view of the world (might be good to also read something more socialist-leaning), at least when it comes to social issues you might get a bit more of a nuance by comparing their takes.

ainch•about 20 hours ago

It's heartening to see that Delayed Gratification has successfully continued their work for so long.

I used to work at Tortoise (who now own/operate The Observer) and our motto was 'Slow News'. We operated on a pretty transparent membership model, but I got the impression that it was difficult to make pure membership work financially, leading to a reliance on other revenue streams like podcasting and business partnerships over time.

rdmuser•about 18 hours ago

They had their 15th birthday late last year: https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...

If you feel interested in following them but it feels too high traffic or chaotic you can follow specific categories with rss by just going to subcategories on the website and adding /feed to the end of the url. Even slower journalism!

For example I follow the long reads one: https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/long-reads/feed

You can do that trick with a lot of sites. One of your old faves started pumping out listicles but still puts out good stuff here and there? Might be worth seeing if those higher quality articles have their own categories with feeds.

wraptile•about 5 hours ago

I've been subscribed to Delayed Gratification for a year now and really enjoy it. Brilliant editorial with beautiful and easily digestible infographics. My only gripe is that at times it's a bit too UK centric at times, but I guess it's understandable this being a UK-based publisher.

networked•about 18 hours ago

I learned about Delayed Gratification when someone linked "The last of the Flying Wallendas" (https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...) in a chatroom. In the spirit of the magazine, I set a reminder to read it in a year. I decided to do it again when the reminder triggered. A total of three years later, it was a good article.

tomhow•about 17 hours ago

Previously:

Delayed Gratification – The Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32222831 - July 2022 (16 comments)

Delayed Gratification: A Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200573 - Jan 2020 (23 comments)

setopt•about 20 hours ago

Sounds very appealing. Anyone here have experience with it? If I want to try it, should I go print or digital? How is the writing compared to say The Economist or other more mainstream options?

dwedge•about 19 hours ago

How is the economist these days? Around a decade ago I read it cover to cover every week for 18 months, but during the brexkt referendum they seemed to go into a tantrum and half of the magazine was always about how brexit was 100% a bad thing. Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news because at some point it's like propaganda. I understand they were started in support of trade deals but even so. Has it improved?

LVB•about 19 hours ago

I've lapsed my subscription because it has, in my opinion, gotten a bit too clickbait-y and many of the articles are sort of thin rehashes of already covered material. It is still better than most, but also fairly pricy.

xmprt•about 18 hours ago

> Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news

I can understand why this might seem like a good take to have but sometimes you need 100% biased news because some things are 100% biased. Things like climate change is real or genocide is bad should not be controversial takes. Convincing people that there are two sides to an argument is exactly how you end up with sensationalism and extreme views that push the Overton window.

dwedge•about 17 hours ago

I understand and appreciate your point, but takes like brexit are nuanced. They might be overall bad, but they will always have some benefits and in my opinion journalism (especially economic journalism) should explain those benefits even if the point is to show that they are more than cancelled out by the negatives. Without this kind of reporting this is exactly how the Overton window gets moved.

I think that when it comes to topics we can vote on, saying X is bad because media says it's totally bad is not really an informed opinion.

Seattle3503•about 19 hours ago

It seems fine now

carlosjobim•about 18 hours ago

You mean "The E-Communist"?

datakan•about 19 hours ago

Also interested in what their biases may be. Being "slow" isn't really enough, they also need to be fair and honest.

speerer•about 19 hours ago

Having subscribeed for years, I find it very good on that front. I haven't detected any political bias, and I suspect they would say that fairness and honesty is what the "journalism" half of "slow journalism" means.

bearjaws•about 20 hours ago

This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.

I have often thought about with my friends who are "terminally online" that they would benefit from NOT being a town crier from times gone by.

Many of my friends hate Twitter, hate Elon and hate social media, but because they have to be first to all the latest news, they remain locked in to Twitter day in and day out. They cannot quit. They are socially bound to them because being the person to start a topic on whats happened in Ukraine, who was traded to the Dolphins, etc is part of their socialization.

It's been baffling to me, as I simply don't see the value in being the "first" to discuss some news, especially if its misinformation.

Anyway, all that to say that I think is a great idea and would really benefit society to return back to less "real time" news, which really tends to drown out the big topics in favor of buzz words and Twitter quips.

keyringlight•about 17 hours ago

I think proximity is a good measure, what different types of news do you need to know and will impact your decision making on different time scales? There's probably a very small amount of things I really need to know (practically) instantly, regional/national/continental/global news might be interesting to be summarized daily/weekly/monthly, but even then it will be different subsets where it affects me or is little more than trivia and will be forgotten quickly as I have little connection to it.

sedawkgrep•about 19 hours ago

> This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.

I agree. Aside from emergencies or other truly circumstance-changing news, I am not sure there's really any value in being immediately informed vs. days or perhaps even weeks later. I just hadn't thought in these terms before.

I can't help but imagine how much healthier our society would be...

SoftTalker•about 19 hours ago

We don't have a local newspaper anymore but there are a couple of bloggers who follow city council meetings and other local happenings. I read those fairly frequently. National/world news I have stopped following at all, as 99.5% of it doesn't affect me and I have no influence over any of it.

sedawkgrep•about 12 hours ago

Doesn’t the saying go something like “all politics are local” ?

pixel_popping•about 19 hours ago

Most people clearly don't benefit from watching the news, tech news is a bit different but regular news are quite useless in general and plain toxic, I frankly advise everyone to take a break from reading the news altogether, maybe do it once a week, stay informed by other means, you won't miss anything, you'll improve your energy and mental health.

45h45h4h•about 19 hours ago

one of the first commenters commenting about not being first - irony

bearjaws•19 minutes ago

It is funny I just happened to refresh HN on a break and this was trending with no comments.

mikestew•about 19 hours ago

https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/all_or_nothing_fallacy...

rjyjfjftjt•about 12 hours ago

I don't think it's a gotcha to point out it's ironic to literally be the thing someone is complaining about.

Further irony, your gotcha is like exactly the point the comic is trying to make. It's like you were made by God to demonstrate failure.

mttch•about 16 hours ago

Was a long term subscriber, now just a podcast listener: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/delayed-gratification-...

velcrovan•about 9 hours ago

As someone curious about subscribing: why did you end your subscription?

hampelm•about 19 hours ago

I'd love a breaking news service that gives me the latest headlines -- but only if they are still true 2 weeks later.

FerretFred•about 18 hours ago

Agreed, and chances are that due to the nature of the event bring reported, we as readers are unable to influence it in sny way. Therefore a couple of weeks delay will make mo difference.

duxup•about 11 hours ago

The best news articles I read on sites like NYT and so on are the ones that come weeks or even months after the events. So much more informative.

wackget•about 10 hours ago

But then how do you make knee-jerk reactions on social media to vilify those who hold politically opposite views to yours?

whatever1•about 17 hours ago

My problem is the opposite. When there are breaking news directly affecting me I have no way of getting them.

In between a myriad of notifications, fake social media posts, total collapse of local radio and tv, I have no idea of how to stay informed.

dwedge•about 19 hours ago

Delayed gratification in my case was going through three captchas before I could even read the advert for a magazine. I know it's common but that disrespect for the customer irks me. How do people here find the content, is it worth trying again?

bcraven•about 19 hours ago

if you like print journalism they're a good option with great print quality

dwedge•about 19 hours ago

Thank you. I'll give them a try, if recommended I can forgive captchas because most companies don't really think about the negative user experience and it's unfair to punish one

surfsvammel•about 14 hours ago

I used to be a subscriber of Delayed Gratification. And I really enjoyed it. But, I’m based in Sweden and it was just too much UK focused stuff for my liking.

FerretFred•about 18 hours ago

The apparent need by the Media to keep issuing constant updates and then suddenly having to retract the story is very frustrating. Each "update" is usually slighly incremental and is invariably a short new paragraph tacked into the previous version. The final version of the story being covered is often a mea culpa retraction because earlier versions were rushed and inaccurate. I'm trying very hard to escape this destructive cycle but it's not easy.

shelled•about 17 hours ago

I cancelled the subscription because I just couldn't connect its stories ever. such was their choices. Not just the subjects and how the stories were from physically so far that I felt it was an exercise in compulsion on my part. I wasn't a fan of the writing style either. Besides, at some point it started to feel like news and journalism were not centre stage, being "delayed" and different were.

choult•about 12 hours ago

I am so glad to see these guys get some well-deserved attention!

I worked with the founders Marcus and Rob, and met their infographics whizz Christian waay back when they were kicking this off. I was blown away by it then, and I continue to be blown away now.

Here's to the next 15 years!

something98•about 17 hours ago

Similar to the longer cycle times, I'm curious if there is the equivalent for HN. I like this site, https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/, but it's once-per-day. I'd at least like once-per-week.

cperciva•about 7 hours ago

I'm guessing you want https://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly/ then?

jrmg•about 17 hours ago

You’re in luck!

https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/

mdp2021•about 15 hours ago

The RSS is hidden (to my checks) but there and working:

https://www.slow-journalism.com/blog/rss

hamper653•about 18 hours ago

Does this publication assume prior basic knowledge of the past months’ events?

rch•about 16 hours ago

Legible News has a weekly edition for subscribers:

https://legiblenews.com/week

mfallon•about 14 hours ago

I think it depends on how you follow it. If you're strategic and surgical about it, breaking news keeps you informed. If it's a routine, if the TV is on all day waiting for something to break, that ultimately makes you sadder and is worse for you.

losvedir•about 19 hours ago

Interesting. I wonder where the "sweet spot" on the delay is. I've given up online news and twitter and all that entirely, and just read my print Economist, which comes weekly. That already has the news somewhat delayed and presumably with less of a rush to report has a little more fact checking.

This advertises up to a 3 month delay. I do like that with that much lead time you can see not just news but sometimes a bit of the fallout and consequences.

Not a fan of the name, though. It reads like those Claude comments that I absolutely despise, where it feels the need to comment in a reactionary way to the feedback it's getting and changes it's making, rather than a forward-looking way that's cohesive with the new state of the codebase.

Maybe I missed it, but is there a back issue available I could page through, or even just a full story somewhere, that I could read so I can evaluate what I think of it?

speerer•about 19 hours ago

Luckily the magazine came long before Claude, but I suppose your comparison describes their mission pretty well. It's a haven of non-AI writing.

akurilin•about 19 hours ago

I enjoyed this magazine and subscribed to it for a while, but I wish there was a US-centered version of it for those of us on this side of the pond.

johnhamlin•about 19 hours ago

I generally wait for a story to get a full feature in The New Yorker or The Atlantic before I give it my attention. Similar concept

vasco•about 13 hours ago

I just don't read any news other than if they show up here or someone in my life tells me. And even then that's way too many news. There's really not a need for any news, if it wasn't by now a 15 year old addiction to come to this site I'd be even happier with even less news. Whoever says you'll not be a productive member of society or that you NEED to know current events to participate, just tell them they're wrong, they're miserable anyway.

LoganDark•about 17 hours ago

For a really long time, I've wanted a way to know just about products that have already actually released, rather than exciting innovations that'll be in the lab for years.

I haven't really had that problem with news.

misiti3780•about 17 hours ago

This is a great idea (although it probably exists in other places) I'm reminded of Taleb's (2)

https://stevenbagley.net/blog/taleb-signal-to-noise.html

Barrin92•about 18 hours ago

I wonder how much news related issues have to do with the way news is presented rather than the frequency at which you read the news. Daily news reading doesn't strike me as concerning given that getting a newspaper delivered in the mail in the morning was entirely normal practice and people didn't seem to experience the distress they do now. Between the 20s and up until the 70s almost every American household subscribed to a daily newspaper.

I figure the fact that news has turned into hedonic consumption is the much bigger deal. Neil Postman wrote a book, Amusing Ourselves to Death outlining how mass media turned all programming into entertainment programming. Everything is stimulating, emotionally charged etc. That to me seems to be the exhausting part.

So as for the title of this publication people really seem to be into the "delayed" part but I think the "gratification" part might be the problem

insane_dreamer•about 13 hours ago

everything these days is "breaking news!" -- I've come to hate that moniker, and sometimes actively ignore anything tagged as such. It goes without saying that I stopped watching TV news years ago--it's pretty much garbage.

ChrisArchitect•about 19 hours ago

highlighting this as 'slow journalism' is a bit odd - it's a magazine, there are lots of them, quarterly etc. The slowness is a given, the delay is the feature.

jrmg•about 17 hours ago

This magazine only covers stories that are at least three months old.