Slow news is good news?
Thursday, November 22, 2007 at 10:58AM I rarely read news online. You might think that leaves me out of crucial blogosphere zeitgeist or military-industrial-political news, but nope: my co-workers filter the web for me, forwarding articles about OpenLaszlo, net neutrality, software-as-a-service, and media business models; and I read messenger-bag-loads of books and magazines. Each month, I read Harper's cover-to-cover, with a liberal (heh) dose of the Atlantic, Utne Reader, MIT Technology Review, San Francisco, and occasional forays into The Economist, and the Sunday New York Times. Then a year or two after things happen, I read non-fiction books: The Looming Tower, the Great Deluge, the Assault on Reason, the Shock Doctrine, that sort of thing.
Reasoned slow analysis with editors and proofreaders and fact-checkers, passages I can go back to years later (without the internet way-back machine), passages that authors will have to stand by for decades, footnotes -- yeah, I'll pay for that. What would the invasion of Iraq look like two years later? A fiasco. What about the Thanskgiving 2007 travel breakdown? Check back in two years and I'll have read some reasoned analysis, complete with footnotes.
Reader Comments (3)
sascha - respectfully, i don't think that adding a temporal dimension within one's comfort zone is all that helpful in discerning truth...
For rhetorical focus, I left out the whole part about listening to NPR daily and reading Salon. I started to get into a thing about paid news versus free news, but hadn't had enough coffee to break down a two-pronged argument into a punchy blog post. Just the sort of creative process that makes me leery of the blogosphere!
i agree that the increase in choice among news sources is a good thing. i also agree that the choice in service (filtered by friends, others, etc.) is a great thing.
this makes it easier to seek out a multitude of perspectives.
regrettably, i just don't know if it makes it easier to get at "the truth"... most of us gravitate towards that which makes us comfortable, whether we know it or not...