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Slow reading
Read it first on my Substack
Lately I’ve been craving coherent threads in media. Front-to-back magazines, rather than sliced up articles. Full albums, rather than playlists. Aggregated digests, rather than the full fire hose.
I think this stems from a desire to step back. The raw feeds of content get continually more overwhelming, continually noisier, without any additional benefit. This is definitely true of social media (read: Twitter); it also crops up in the hot take cycle across blogs and news sites.
I don’t think it’s a revelation to advocate for more intentional, slower engagement with content, or to filter the vast majority of media through domain experts. But it’s worth emphasizing as an alternative mode of keeping up with the news.
This is especially true as more tools seem to crop up enabling healthier media engagement. Some companies have tried to cater to the idea of slower news, and/or news that has a clear end point. FT Edit is an interesting recent experiment in this area. I don’t think “slow news” is a particularly promising business model, given the vast array of incentives to the contrary, but the attempts to move in this direction are encouraging.
Certainly at the individual level, we’re well equipped to stave off the real-time information flow often thrust on us by platforms. Newsletters are…
