May I immodestly suggest I used it well prior to the Friday you heard it. “Slow News” is featured in the closing lines of my book, The Dangerous World of Butterflies (published by Lyons Press in May, 2009). “How nice to be in hot pursuit of a gorgeous creature,” I wrote about the year I spent studying the butterfly underworld as a breather from my usual beats of disasters, “instead of responding to bad news, especially an animal that brings such happiness to so many of us — and does no harm. It’s made me think of the slow food movement as a model. Perhaps it’s time to launch the slow news movement (yesterday’s news tomorrow).”

My context was different from Zuckerman’s, but it sounds as if our motivations and goals are in sync.

You’re kidding, right?
Like, most people are going to be half as smart or considerate as you are?
Like, they’ll make the effort?
And you can TEACH them how,
because they want to learn to do it if they don’t do it already?

I ~ and human history ~ shake my head sadly.

So, it’s possible, but, I’ll admit, hard. I would happily pay for a publication whose stated purpose was “slow news.”

The decline of the record labels hasn’t caused music to get worse, though music they produce is worse. More people are doing more interesting music now than ever.

Your A-list obsession is getting really tiresome, by the way. You might consider giving it a bit of a rest.

This is longstanding FAQ – “When will it stop being too soon?” When will it be acceptable to say – though nothing is ever completely determinative in the world, etc, etc. – that reasonable evidence is in, and it’s a failure. If the answer is “NEVER! It’ll always be early days, we’re just at the beginning, etc etc” – that’s an intellectual abdication.
(I cynically suspect the answer is that we can call something a failure only when it’s clear that A-listers can’t make any money off it)

The “therefore” comes out of the background that, to be very simplistic since this is a comment not a book, there are only a very few existing workable models for large scale news. The blogged-down ad-supported model gives every indication of being worse than what preceded it. This failure is thus an argument for revisiting opposing models, such as public-sector support.