Slow News Revisited

In 2018, I talked about "slow news". Since then, the media has gone a subscirption boom. More and more "sovereign writers" have left big publishers to serve their own audience .

I still try to opt out of the daily rush of news, for something slower and more considered, but there is so much quality analysis that it's easy for me to bury myself daily in dozens of weekly newsletters. So far, my response has mostly been to allow myself to declare bankruptcy. I used to be a completionist with books and blogs (pour one out for google reader), but now I am much choosier. I'll look up spoilers on the wiki for a fiction book that doesn't capture me to save a few hours. I'll listen to a podcast interview with a non-fiction author to get the gist of the book. And I'll skim my newsletters and archive the rest at the end of each week.

There is so much content, and it's still so hard to sort for quality, and to find time to digest and reflect rather than just constantly consuming. Until there are better AIs to deliver the signal from the news, the bias to consuming less, less frequently, and raising the quality level of what I consume still seems to be the right trade off.