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  • Hacker News
  • Sounds very appealing. Anyone here have experience with it? If I want to try it, should I go print or digital? How is the writing compared to say The Economist or other more mainstream options?
    by setopt
  • Also interested in what their biases may be. Being "slow" isn't really enough, they also need to be fair and honest.
    by datakan
  • How is the economist these days? Around a decade ago I read it cover to cover every week for 18 months, but during the brexkt referendum they seemed to go into a tantrum and half of the magazine was always about how brexit was 100% a bad thing. Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news because at some point it's like propaganda. I understand they were started in support of trade deals but even so. Has it improved?
    by dwedge
  • I learned about Delayed Gratification when someone linked "The last of the Flying Wallendas" (https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...) in a chatroom. In the spirit of the magazine, I set a reminder to read it in a year. I decided to do it again when the reminder triggered. A total of three years later, it was a good article.
    by networked
  • My problem is the opposite. When there are breaking news directly affecting me I have no way of getting them.

    In between a myriad of notifications, fake social media posts, total collapse of local radio and tv, I have no idea of how to stay informed.

    by whatever1
  • This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.

    I have often thought about with my friends who are "terminally online" that they would benefit from NOT being a town crier from times gone by.

    Many of my friends hate Twitter, hate Elon and hate social media, but because they have to be first to all the latest news, they remain locked in to Twitter day in and day out. They cannot quit. They are socially bound to them because being the person to start a topic on whats happened in Ukraine, who was traded to the Dolphins, etc is part of their socialization.

    It's been baffling to me, as I simply don't see the value in being the "first" to discuss some news, especially if its misinformation.

    Anyway, all that to say that I think is a great idea and would really benefit society to return back to less "real time" news, which really tends to drown out the big topics in favor of buzz words and Twitter quips.

    by bearjaws
  • one of the first commenters commenting about not being first - irony
    by 45h45h4h
  • Most people clearly don't benefit from watching the news, tech news is a bit different but regular news are quite useless in general and plain toxic, I frankly advise everyone to take a break from reading the news altogether, maybe do it once a week, stay informed by other means, you won't miss anything, you'll improve your energy and mental health.
    by pixel_popping
  • > This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.

    I agree. Aside from emergencies or other truly circumstance-changing news, I am not sure there's really any value in being immediately informed vs. days or perhaps even weeks later. I just hadn't thought in these terms before.

    I can't help but imagine how much healthier our society would be...

    by sedawkgrep
  • I think proximity is a good measure, what different types of news do you need to know and will impact your decision making on different time scales? There's probably a very small amount of things I really need to know (practically) instantly, regional/national/continental/global news might be interesting to be summarized daily/weekly/monthly, but even then it will be different subsets where it affects me or is little more than trivia and will be forgotten quickly as I have little connection to it.
    by keyringlight
  • It's heartening to see that Delayed Gratification has successfully continued their work for so long.

    I used to work at Tortoise (who now own/operate The Observer) and our motto was 'Slow News'. We operated on a pretty transparent membership model, but I got the impression that it was difficult to make pure membership work financially, leading to a reliance on other revenue streams like podcasting and business partnerships over time.

    by ainch
  • They had their 15th birthday late last year: https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...

    If you feel interested in following them but it feels too high traffic or chaotic you can follow specific categories with rss by just going to subcategories on the website and adding /feed to the end of the url. Even slower journalism!

    For example I follow the long reads one: https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/long-reads/feed

    You can do that trick with a lot of sites. One of your old faves started pumping out listicles but still puts out good stuff here and there? Might be worth seeing if those higher quality articles have their own categories with feeds.

    by rdmuser
  • In this spirit, I prefer to not read any online news, or daily newspaper, but the weekly Economist in print. It has higher quality writing than all the rest, has a built in capacitor buffer against high frequency low signal bullshit (noise) by virtue of being weekly, and contains all the information about the world that mattered in that time period. Zero engagement bait because it's an expensive subscription.
    by kridsdale3
  • I found the Economist to be a liberal rag. I mean that respectfully, and it has been a number of years since I've bothered to pick one up so maybe it has changed. I know people who I respect that read every issue cover to cover.

    A newspaper called The Economist should not take a hyper-critical view of conservatism or right-leaning politics across the globe, and hyper-liberal views about decisions leaders are making. I do not need my morals being shaped by my news outlet - full stop.

    I find the Week and the Financial Times to be significantly better.

    by the_sleaze_
  • I have been a long time subscriber to the economist for the same reason. The print edition is great and keeps me feeling informed. If only it wouldn’t include the digital edition too… Invariably, the more stressed I get in my everyday life by work and small children and lack of sleep, the more I get dragged towards the online edition of the economist, and BAM I’m back in the constant instant news cycle again, even though the site doesn’t update that often.

    My latest life hack which I can recommend to anyone, at least in Germany: as part of my local library membership I get access to the PressReader app, which gives me access to the print edition of the economist! At 10 EUR a year it’s so affordable it nearly feels like it’s unethically so for what I get. I guess I’ll close with: May we forever be blessed with libraries, and may they never be „optimised away“ as an unnecessary social good.

    by probst
  • I haven't read or engaged in mainstream media in over 15 years now. I just pulled up the Economist website for fun to see what's on it. I see stories that have absolutely nothing to do with me or the country (e.g. an article gushing about how China managed to stop massively polluting one of their rivers. In what universe is that remotely relevant to me? Why is this the front page story?), I see the typical biased articles and bias in choosing what to report on, everything all biased politically the same way (of course, if you hold the same biases then you don't see the bias, it all just just looks normal/neutral/true to you), I see stories increasing the fear and hate in the world (China has a scary secretive shadowy maritime militia! Oil markets are scary right now! Be afraid!), there's absolutely nothing of interest to me. Guess I'll go another 15.
    by thegrim33
  • I've been building something similar for my own purposes. Basically, I use Calibre's "Fetch News" functionality to get epubs of all the news sources I trust, and then once a month (interval is configurable), I run a pipeline over all of it (some LLM magic, partly local partly API) to dedupe and rank stories, then compile it into an actual honest-to-goodness newspaper (using Typst for layout and stuff), then read that at my leisure.
    by abound
  • The what now. But not all sources have epubs, right? Is there any one that you're missing now?
    by kristerv
  • This sounds really interesting and something I'd love to try. Do you have more details on how someone else can utilise this?
    by sheesdev
  • I ran a similar personal project where weekly I scraped a country's news stories across curated sources using Brave News API and used an LLM to dedupe and cluster stories. This got expensive fast, so I'm wondering what your approach is to keep costs down across what I imagine is a lot of volume, i.e., one months' worth of stories across several sources.
    by jonathanlb
  • the twenty-four hour news cycle's unyielding need for urgent content has broken many people psychologically and we need to 'deprogram' them.

    i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"

    by parpfish
  • that is really interesting idea. I'd be really happy to read such a site, as I very often wonder if current hype/prediction will be relevant in the future. But I always forget to check being flooded by more hype.

    What would you need to start such a project?

    by ArekDymalski
  • https://www.verity.news/ might be interesting for you; they try to show you both sides of the spin.
    by cachvico
  • Agreed. The 24 hour news and social media with our brightest phds learning to drain all attention from you have broken and radicalized our society.
    by foobar_______
  • A well informed population is important. The problem is they're not well informed they're well-hooked to whatever exaggeration and drama the news can whip up.

    The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.

    by colechristensen
  • I just wanna throw in that Tangle News[0] strikes a pretty good balance here. Their core offering is detailed breakdowns of what is generally regarded as the top four stories of the week, one a day from Monday through Thursday, which is usually more than enough space to keep you "up on current events", and they usually (though not always) tend to give enough space to let stories develop before summarizing.

    They're a good fit on your "one week" timescale.

    [0]: https://www.readtangle.com/

    by Brendinooo
  • I was subscribed to this. It's beautifully designed, well written, good paper stock, the works. If the idea appeals to you, it's worth trying.

    Ultimately, it didn't work for me, but that's my fault. Despite my best intentions, it turned out I wasn't interested in reading about world affairs beyond the news cycle.

    by petercooper
  • I subscribed for a year, but like a sibling comment said, it was too focused on Commonwealth news and culture to be worth my time.

    It was however entertaining to receive in the mail, inside a nice form-fitting cardboard box with Royal Mail elegantly stamped on it.

    by jihadjihad
  • The target audience of this doesn't appear to be people who don't like reading the news. But rather people who like reading journalism that has perspective and nuance (which tend to improve when you take your time to let a story fully develop before writing about it).
    by wavemode
  • Did they show the same news as everyone, but later? That seems like it doesn't fully leverage the format. The format seems like it would be good for things that are subtle and got overlooked at the time. But I guess maybe the normal news cycle can surface those same things when they reach a breaking point.
    by Seattle3503