Skipping the news cycle

Yesterday, The New Yorker published an article called “The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News“. The author argues the case for his want of a slower, more in-depth news.

He writes:

Media outlets have been reduced to fighting over a shrinking share of our attention online; as Facebook, Google, and other tech platforms have come to monopolize our digital lives, news organizations have had to assume a subsidiary role, relying on those sites for traffic. That dependence exerts a powerful influence on which stories are pursued, how they’re presented, and the speed and volume at which they’re turned out.

For digital-media organizations sustained by advertising, the temptations are almost irresistible. Each time a reader comes to a news site from a social-media or search platform, the visit, no matter how brief, brings in some amount of revenue. Foer calls this phenomenon “drive-by traffic.”

I had this need too and decided last summer to switch from the New York Times to The Economist. I just read their weekly paper on my iPad. For me, the weekly interval is more than enough to keep up with what’s happening in the world. It also filters out all the misinformation and misinterpretation which creeps into the news reporting including by the NYT because of the urgency to put out the news as quickly as possible.

I like it so far, it works well.

You might ask how I got to this article? It popped on Hacker News. I visit Hacker News and Techmeme once a day to see what people are talking about in tech.