Speed is the disease of the digital age.
In today’s newsrooms, pressure to publish stories at an increasingly fast rate often means that reporters are able to uncover only basic information and complete a surface-level analysis. Twenty years ago media experts were already warning that working at high speeds encourages journalists “to fall back on well-worn themes and observations—interpretive clichés.” In today’s world of digital media, this effect has been compounded.
Carl Honoré, a Canadian journalist and popular commentator on the “Slow Movement,” writes that, “Today we are addicted to speed, to cramming more and more into every minute. Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock, a dash to a finish line that we never seem to reach.”
But there is another way to reach a more meaningful destination when it comes to understanding the complex world around us: “slow journalism.”
Questioning the premise that faster is better, slow journalism is about taking the time to report the news with close attention and more depth.
It’s important to note that the principles at stake in this form of reporting are not as simple as the fast-slow dichotomy might suggest. There’s more to the mechanics of digitalization, globalization, and speed than merely working faster, and there’s more to slow journalism than just slowing everything down again.
Geoffrey Craig, of the Auckland University of Technology, points out that the metaphor of “acceleration” is an oversimplification of the sociopolitical trends we’re experiencing in our modern, global, digital world.
“The picture is less of any simple acceleration in the pace of life or the experiences of spatial ‘collapse’ than of a far more complex restructuring in the nature and experience of time and space,” Craig writes.
In effect, in the revolution of 21st-century media, time is simultaneously speeding up and slowing down. The world is shrinking and swelling at once.
Digital media have put the world at our fingertips, allowing us to interact with both storytellers and the protagonists of stories on the other side of the world. But they also expand our internal maps and timelines by bringing us into contact with faraway people and places we otherwise might never have known existed. At its best slow journalism engages not just with the bogeyman of toxic speed but with the complex intersection of speed and slowness that’s emerging in our dizzying, contemporary world.
Before we get to that, though, what exactly is slow journalism?
There’s no simple consensus. It’s been variously called a movement, a meme, and a theory. As an emerging field in journalism theory, slow journalism is still being defined. But Erik Neveu, an expert at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, offers some broad characteristics of this immersive and thoughtful form of news gathering:
1. Literal slowness: A slow journalist takes “time to check facts, to gather and process data.”
2. Investigation: A slow journalist works in serious reportage “gathering and producing news, not of recycling or commenting on it.”
3. Selectiveness: A slow journalist winnows away what is trivial and demands that journalism be “selective, explanatory.”
4. Length and narrative quality: “Slow suggests narrative, and often longer-form writing” to offer readers depth and craft.
5. Fairness: Slow journalism promotes transparency.
6. Commensality: Slow Journalism serves the community.
7. Participation: “Slow journalism transforms its audiences into partners,” encouraging readers to respond to and contribute to producing the news.
8. The telling of untold stories: Slow Journalism focuses on the “deep,” the “untold,” the “backstage,” demonstrating “an almost ethnographic, grassroots vision of society.
How should we interpret this list? Does a story need to tick every one of these boxes to qualify as slow journalism? Surely not.
Long-form investigative journalism often requires a level of guarded research and even secrecy that makes community-building and participation impossible but still seems to qualify as slow. Likewise celebrity profiles like Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra has a cold” are hardly telling untold stories, but they satisfy many of the other requirements for slowness. To give the term slow journalism descriptive power, we need a way to locate its meaning more accurately. But how?
Two scholars offer promising suggestions.
Megan Le Masurier, a media professor at the University of Sydney, published the first serious scholarly attempt to define slow journalism. She argues that slow journalism should not be defined by any specific set of characteristics but rather by “a critical orientation to the effects of speed on the practice of journalism.”
Although journalism that can be described as slow has existed for centuries, the term is only gaining traction now: What’s new, says Le Masurier, is the broader context of a globalized world where “fast” media are struggling to deal with complex stories. Neveu, for his part, argues that we ought to think of slow journalism as an “ideal type”: a concept whose function is not to describe reality but to interrogate it.
So rather than labeling a news story as slow journalism or not, a more useful approach is to think of degrees of “slowness” in a story. A story is slow in so far as it consciously addresses those elements of journalism that are at risk of being left behind in our increasingly complex, inattentive, media-saturated world.
Stories satisfying the first five criteria of slow journalism listed above have been common for decades: Investigative Journalism, Literary Journalism, New Journalism, and New New Journalism are just some of the banners they’ve flown under.
Today, publications like Delayed Gratification, Aeon, XXI, Narratively and De Correspondent identify themselves as destinations for slow journalism in the sense captured by those five criteria. Stories satisfying the latter three criteria are less common, but a raft of current publication and projects (including the Out of Eden walk) are experimenting in areas of co-creative media and participatory, community-led journalism. Regardless of which criteria are emphasized, the key is that slow journalism is not endorsing some backward, Luddite ideal of slowness—rather it promotes the innovative use of both fast and slow.
Let’s return to the notion that effective slow journalism needs to engage not merely with the oversimplified problem of acceleration in modern media but with the reality of a complex intersection of speed and slowness at the heart of today’s global, digital world. What does this mean in practice?
Crucially, it means that slow journalism isn’t engaged in nostalgia—it is not a thinly disguised throwback to a simpler time before the Internet and social media “ruined everything.” Although the ever-increasing influence of digital (and particularly social) media has contributed to an arms race mentality of faster-is-better, it’s vital to recognize that these media also offer exciting opportunities to engage with readers in ways that have never been possible before.
Articles such as The Guardian’s report on the impact of a 2013 bushfire in Tasmania, and John Branch’s famous account for the New York Times of the 2012 avalanche at Tunnel Creek, demonstrate the power of digital media to turn long-form journalism, which can be difficult and (literally) slow to read, into something instantaneously accessible and captivating. Paul Salopek’s Milestones might be seen in a similar light.
More than extolling the status of simple technologies (conversation over Twitter, walking over jet travel), slow journalism is about using both fast and slow technologies in a smarter way. Slow journalism seeks a synthesis of approaches that creates excellence amid the often shallow blur of reporting in our global, digital age: deep, complex, ethical, high quality, and able to convince a community of readers that it’s worth investing time and attention in a story.
There will always be a need for information to be distributed quickly—say, news about natural disasters or financial markets. Slow journalism can’t reduce the pace at which this kind of news is produced, nor does it seek to do so. Slow journalism is a critical theory encouraging journalists working in all fields and on all timescales to be mindful of the way journalism is changing. Sometimes journalists need a reminder that when speed is allowed to take the lead, it comes at the cost of analysis, of context, of complexity. Slow journalism offers a framework for a healthier balance. It demonstrates that we can have the best of both worlds. We just need to pause and think every now and then.
Matt Norman is an Australian freelance writer, entrepreneur, and journalism student. You can follow him on Twitter at @m_j_norman.