shinyblog

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Slow news is good news?

I rarely read news online. You might think that leaves me out of crucial blogosphere zeitgeist or military-industrial-political news, but nope: my co-workers filter the web for me, forwarding articles about OpenLaszlo, net neutrality, software-as-a-service, and media business models; and I read messenger-bag-loads of books and magazines. Each month, I read Harper's cover-to-cover, with a liberal (heh) dose of the Atlantic, Utne Reader, MIT Technology Review, San Francisco, and occasional forays into The Economist, and the Sunday New York Times. Then a year or two after things happen, I read non-fiction books: The Looming Tower, the Great Deluge, the Assault on Reason, the Shock Doctrine, that sort of thing.
Reasoned slow analysis with editors and proofreaders and fact-checkers, passages I can go back to years later (without the internet way-back machine), passages that authors will have to stand by for decades, footnotes -- yeah, I'll pay for that. What would the invasion of Iraq look like two years later? A fiasco. What about the Thanskgiving 2007 travel breakdown? Check back in two years and I'll have read some reasoned analysis, complete with footnotes.

3 Comments:

  • sascha - respectfully, i don't think that adding a temporal dimension within one's comfort zone is all that helpful in discerning truth...

    By Blogger Unknown, at 11:41 AM  

  • For rhetorical focus, I left out the whole part about listening to NPR daily and reading Salon. I started to get into a thing about paid news versus free news, but hadn't had enough coffee to break down a two-pronged argument into a punchy blog post. Just the sort of creative process that makes me leery of the blogosphere!

    By Blogger benjamin shine, at 11:45 AM  

  • i agree that the increase in choice among news sources is a good thing. i also agree that the choice in service (filtered by friends, others, etc.) is a great thing.

    this makes it easier to seek out a multitude of perspectives.

    regrettably, i just don't know if it makes it easier to get at "the truth"... most of us gravitate towards that which makes us comfortable, whether we know it or not...

    By Blogger Unknown, at 3:03 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home