Slow News Days

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I am leaning increasingly on a philosophy of slow news. It’s a pretty big change for me, because I used to enjoy getting information from multiple media, especially the radio. NPR and PRI podcasts used to be a staple. But over time, I have found audio and video takes a long time to tell a story and the emotion in it tends to be the point, rather than the information. I really appreciated this piece from Laura Hazard Owen at the Nieman Journalism Lab. She described some specific ways that she is changing how she ingests news.

It’s one person’s experience. But it has reminded me of how I have experienced media in the last few years. Merely reading through or viewing media can create emotional ups and downs that linger. I do not doomscroll as a rule but I know that there have been times when I looked at my phone—it’s always my phone—and I had missed changes around me and sometimes not realized how much time had passed.

Action, Not Reaction

One particular change the author made was to read the news, not the reactions to the news. It seems to me that so much of what is in the news stream these days are reactions to events, rather than the events themselves. It is such a habit among media that I would get requests from journalists “to react” to circumstances that had nothing to do with me or the circumstances in which I was navigating, merely because they needed someone to react.

My own experience, both in participating in media interviews and ingesting them, suggests that this need for reaction is part of how the news cycle continues to spin. Lack of reactions might cause the wheel to slow down or even stop. It is a way of stretching out the life of a news story, to interject the “too much, too soon, too little, too late” opinions that inevitably arise around events.

We used to read media to know about an event. Now we have media reflecting an event, then seeking reactions, and also creating subordinate pieces to create their own reactions. In particular, we are awash with “what we know about” pieces that bridge the social media armchair quarterbacking, Wikipedia, and doxxing. The original story might have touched on the relevance of a person, but now we can know what they they were like as a teenager or unrelated events that will help us like or hate them, and to respond and react accordingly.

It’s filler and distraction. It’s noise that begets noise, as these stories are shared on social media platforms that encourage responses that are highly charged. The reaction becomes the next story and internet beefs or cat fights or what have you layer on the cacophony.

I don’t believe emotion is bad in story telling, or that video or audio are inherently irredeemable media. But I find that they are, like social media platforms like Twitter, designed to amplify emotion as much or more as they are to share news or information. They need a hook, they need you to be hooked, to watch the program repeatedly, to listen and subscribe to the podcast, to leave your car radio on a single station.

Keeping To My Text

I’ve posted a lot about RSS on this blog and I have been slowly building out my information intake to come almost wholly via RSS feeds. Some are provided by the publisher and some are crafted by me to fill a gap left by a publisher. Unlike video or audio media, I can pull in and aggregate a wide variety of news sources, not just rely on the personalities and perspectives of “talent”.

There is a risk of a filter bubble when you select in this way but the filter is within your control. You can select feeds that align with your interests or your politics but you can also choose to step beyond that. When you aggregate and curate a news feed, you can take chances on a wider selection of publishers, because you do not need to invest the time to visit each site yourself.

How many of us have started at a single news site and stayed to consume our news on it, rather than hopping and skipping around the internet to get a wider haul of facts and opinions? News media sites want to capture our attention—like so much of the internet, they need us to see their advertising—and multiple points of view is antithetical to this perspective or business goal. Just like when we might buy a print newspaper and a large amount of our news consumption, if only because of the time involved to read the paper, was captured by a single publisher.

The thing I find as I scroll through my news feed (which currently pulls from 75 feed sources) is a much lower reactive response to news. By pulling it to me, and out of social media where I might be tempted to respond or react, I can consider it and keep it in perspective. It’s one reason I started to really notice these “what do we know” media pieces. I now scroll by them, seeing them as the information cruft that they are. This is something I could not do if I was on a linear media like video or audio, where you have to sit through the cruft to reach the next story.

The benefit to me of this approach is that news doesn’t prey on my mind in an emotional way after I’ve read it. I don’t spend time recovering from the reaction or, worse, trying to compose a reaction. This doesn’t mean being unemotional about news. There are terrible things and amazingly wonderful things happening all around us, all the time. But I want to focus on the emotion that the event engenders in me, not the emotions caused by reactions.

Brightly Segmented Media

This is especially true when the reactions may be caused not by people or not by people with an honest response. Anyone who has been on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or other social media is likely to have seen, if not experienced, trolls or bots or other actors whose purpose is to generate reactions.

I have left Twitter except to maintain my handle on the site. It is not a place I plan to ever engage on in the future. I tried to clean up my corner, so that it at least couldn’t be misused by Twitter’s AI experiments. I removed most of my subscribers unless I knew them or saw they had a relationship to my work.

A number of American adults consume their news from social media. This Pew Research doesn’t suggest it’s their sole source but one wonders how much of a news diet consists of social media content (compared to how much by video or audio or website text). More recent research focuses on so-called news influencers. In this research, we have largely left the realm of journalism: 77% of the influencers have no “present or past affiliation” with a news organization.

I sometimes get news from social media but, especially now that I am off Twitter and mostly only using Mastodon, it’s a very different experience. I don’t follow media so the only time I see news content in my feeds is when someone I trust puts it there. There are no algorithms to force news into my feed. I have also toggled off any awareness of engagement—how many boosts or retweets, how many likes or favorites—so my own engagement with any news or information isn’t driven by how many other people have engaged with it.

On Twitter, I had a professional account that became a bit too personal and I had a personal account that I used only periodically. Looking back, I realized that I never really found my community on Twitter. I was reading this piece from The Atlantic, about BlueSky, and thought that this quote was pretty close to describing what Twitter was:

It is easy to see, in hindsight, but I don’t think that’s why I joined Twitter in the first place. I think, like many people, it was with a hope for community. For some people, I think that hope became reality. But when I think of Twitter—and Instagram and Facebook and Bluesky—I think the draw is to be a bystander but feel as though you are in the thick of things, interacting with important people.

I’ve noticed a lot of tension on Mastodon about people who are on other platforms. It is, in a way, a mixture of fear of missing out but also a wish for community and realizing that people with whom we want to interact may choose to be on a different platform. That wasn’t really an option with Twitter: people were on it or off it, effectively. Even that was deceptive though, with most people not being on Twitter or any micro-blogging service, choosing instead to be on Facebook or another Meta product.

I have enjoyed my increasingly reaction-free media diet. I have created a Bluesky profile to start to experiment there. Unlike with Twitter, though, I do not have any plans to participate in a community there. It is time to learn from mistakes, and to learn how to use the application as it was designed. Bluesky seems like a good place to amplify and broadcast, especially as a professional alternative to LinkedIn or Twitter.

Unlike Twitter, I plan to keep a very bright line regarding how I use each media platform I am on. RSS for news, Mastodon for community and emotional engagement, Bluesky for … I’m not quite sure yet: self-promotion, development of my professional persona, it’s not clear. I would like to be present on the site but I am not open to following Bluesky to the same toxic place that Twitter and other algorithmic apps can lead to.

Lesson learned. There are healthy ways to discover and engage with information. I think we will all need to be far more deliberate if we want to find a balance between being informed and mentally healthy.