Slow Journalism

When Bob Franklin asked me whether I thought there was potential interest in the topic of slow journalism for a special issue of Journalism Practice I was keen to send out a call for papers to see what fish might be in that sea. But I was quietly sceptical that the haul could fill an issue. The response was surprising; a sizeable catch of enough quality abstracts, from scholars in many countries, to fill not just an issue of Journalism Practice but an issue of Digital Journalism as well. While “Slow Journalism” as a term has only had a sketchy existence over the past 10 years, and more so in media than in scholarship, it appears that the concept has traction. Many scholars and practitioners internationally have been thinking critically about the problems wrought by speed, and are utilising the concept of “slow” to explain a new way of thinking about and producing journalism.

My contribution to the development of the scholarly understanding of slow journalism was an article published in Journalism Practice in 2015, “What is Slow Journalism?” The title, a question, was perhaps misleading in suggesting there could be a firm answer. As I wrote, “this journalism does not require a checklist of key characteristics to qualify as Slow. The term, like the Slow movement itself, is more a critical orientation to the effects of speed on the practice of journalism” (Le Masurier 2015, 143). Slow Journalism is not prescriptive, but those practitioners who use the term to describe their work, and those journalists whose work embodies the spirit of the term, are all producing journalism that enacts a critique of the limitations and dangers of the speed of much of the mainstream contemporary journalistic environment. This is why the concept of Slow Journalism has emerged now, and seems to carry such appeal, even though there have been types of journalism produced and consumed slowly for centuries. What is new is the context of hyper-acceleration and over-production of journalism, where quality has suffered, ethics are compromised and user attention has eroded. The ethical problems that have surfaced in journalism across the past decade, with greater importance and urgency than ever, provides the context for the emergence of slow journalism as a consciously ethical practice. The need for speed and the capitalist news ethic of beating the competition have left many asking if there is another way to practise journalism. The emergence of Slow Journalism suggests that there is. Also new are the self-reflexivity of journalists and the emergence of new media outlets that are embracing slow, and experimenting with new business models to fund their practice. Slow Journalism is a new term for new times.

In the opening article of Journalism Practice, Erik Neveu (2016) explores the utility of the concept slow journalism “to work as a shorthand description of the variety of changes and alternatives which are simmering in the field” (Journalism Practice 10.4). He discusses the polysemy of the term, and whether its many levels of signification—slow as taking time; as investigative; as less; as longer-form narrative; as fair, transparent, ethical; as serving a community; as participatory; as telling untold stories—might work against its value for empirical use. By deploying Weber’s concept of the “ideal type,” the function of which is “to question reality, not to describe or summarise it,” Neveu suggests that if we avoid trying to pin slow journalism down too closely, or viewing it as a simplistic binary opposition to hyper-modern fast practices, it can indeed be a “remarkably fruitful” concept to make sense of the current changes in journalism practice. He argues for a “softer mapping” of slow journalisms as “explanatory, non-fiction and mobilised.” Journalism is a plural noun and the practices of slow journalism reflect this.

In his essay “Reclaiming Slowness in Journalism: Critique, Complexity and Difference,” Geoffrey Craig (2015; Journalism Practice 10.4) builds on his seminal work on slow living (Parkins and Craig 2006), taking some of these insights to journalism. He argues that we need both fast and slow journalism, of course, but that a slower practice can reinforce key functions of journalism that are under challenge: the need for journalists to critique the society they report; to synthesise and thoroughly explain the informational complexities of contemporary life; and report knowledgeably about difference in an increasingly pluralist society. Craig writes:

Fast forms of journalism must rely to a greater degree on the mobilization of political, social and cultural assumptions in reportage but this becomes increasingly problematic when so many expressions of identity and lifestyle challenge more traditional ways of life and understandings of community.

To respond thoughtfully to these social and cultural changes, journalists require time to explore other perspectives, to listen and to embrace an ethic of care.

In a hyper-mediated world, the politics of listening has become a subject for scholarly attention (see Couldry 2006; O’Donnell, Lloyd, and Dreher 2009). The synergies of this body of work with slow journalism are potentially strong. In her contribution, “Lessening the Construction of Otherness: A Slow Ethics of Journalism,” radio journalist and scholar Helene Thomas (2016) is concerned with listening and how a slow approach to interviewing in a local Rwandan context leads to a quite different result for the journalist, one that tries to consciously avoid othering (Journalism Practice 10.4). The focus of her practice was to tell the story of the serial killing of 18 Rwandan women sex workers in 2012 and two murders in 2013, which resulted in a radio documentary A Silent Tragedy. Giving the “true storytellers” the time and space to tell the story on their own terms, and learning from them, Thomas developed a “slow ethics” of interviewing which offers a challenge to the traditional interview techniques of Western journalists, where time limits, control, interjection, direction and often an adversarial approach tend to dominate. The core principles involve reciprocity, responsibility, respectfulness, patience and hospitality, which, Thomas argues, “leads to ethical encounters with far-away Others and an ethical media process.”

Mike Ananny (2016), in his essay “Networked News Time: How Slow—or Fast—Do Publics Need News to Be?,” explores the concept of “the public right to hear” through an analysis of the temporal elements of the networked press, which he terms a “temporal assemblage” (Digital Journalism 4.4). In the context of contemporary news time, the challenge is to connect accounts of how press assemblages create journalistic rhythms with theories of what publics need from networked news time. He writes:

If networked news rhythms are set by labor, platforms, algorithms, and laws, then forces with the power to do so might configure their relationships in ways that realize the time required for a public right to hear—pauses to reflect, hesitate, and doubt and make timely interventions into the inextricable consequences of shared social life.

Ananny adds a temporal dimension to Roger Silverstone’s argument that the media can create “proper distance” (configurations of space and meaning that are “distinctive, correct, and ethically or socially appropriate;” Silverstone 2003, 473) with the idea of “proper time.” Benjamin Ball (2016), in his contribution “Multimedia, Slow Journalism as Process and the Possibility of Proper Time,” also builds on Silverstone (Digital Journalism 4.4). “Proper time” for Ball refers not to “perfect duration, pace, tempo or length, but—instead—it is about reflexive consideration, on the part of journalists, for how understanding can be achieved in, and through, journalism.” Slow journalism describes the “moral tenor of the communicative process” rather than its duration, tempo or formal characteristics. While communication may be increasingly faster and easier, Ball argues “understanding one another in media is a task that requires time.”

Slow journalism has actually been a term that anthropologists have used to describe their ethnographic work based on long-term immersion in communities. Anne Hermann (2015) uses this as a take-off point to elaborate a theory of slow ethnographic journalism, where time operates in a number of registers (Journalism Practice 10.4). Based on interviews with prominent ethnographic journalists such as Ted Conover, William Finnegan and Alex Kotlowitz, Hermann (2004) develops a tri-partite model of temporal practice, building on Ulf Hannerz’ work on “writing time.” To “regimentation” (where tight deadlines are abandoned in favour of time-consuming research and the writing of longer-form narratives) and “representation” (where slow ethnographic journalists report on the quotidian and non-urgent stories), she adds “reorientation” (a temporal tipping point, where, through the experience of immersion, the journalist abandons preconceptions and develops a situated point of view). In slow journalism, Hermann writes, “‘wasting time’ can, in fact, produce ‘added value’ by delivering something radically refined compared to the news products that flood the internet.”

Matthew Ricketson (2015), in his essay “When Slow News is Good News,” also explores the value of longer-form slow journalism, but here as book-length journalism about historic news events, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Journalism Practice 10.4). He draws on James Carey’s (1986) argument that journalism needs to be understood as a corpus, rather than a set of isolated immediate stories. “The obsessive identification of journalism with a thirst to be first with the news has drastically narrowed public understanding of it as a democratic social practice,” writes Ricketson. He explores how the immediate news, especially in the context of war, cannot provide the detail, depth and perspective that can turn limited pieces of information into understanding and knowledge.

As the skills required to create journalism across platforms proliferate, and the possibilities for more layered and complex journalism increase in response, the need for co-operation between once hermetically sealed organisations emerges. Teamwork and collaboration is a feature of the slow journalism of Borderland: Dispatches from the US–Mexico Border, a multimedia collaboration between National Public Radio’s (NPR) Morning Edition and San Francisco’s Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). As Stuart Davis (2016) explores in his case study, this collaboration allows for in-depth and multi-layered reporting—the qualitative ethnographic approach of NPR and the quantitative data-driven approach of CIR—that challenges the often surface and sensationalised news coverage of the border, allowing for a far more complex story to be told about the political, economic and cultural life in the region (Digital Journalism 4.4). Davis notes, “the extensive degree of cooperation between these two organizations with different approaches to news production illustrates how common advocacy-related goals might create bridges between aesthetic styles or representational strategies.”

Non-competition is a radical practice for traditional media organisations but as Jan Boyles’ (2015) case study of the news media in post-Katrina New Orleans shows, a number of news organisations have been teaming up to produce the slower in-depth journalism that is needed for the local community, sharing the costs, the by-lines and branding (Digital Journalism 4.4). Based on in-depth fieldwork and interviews with major players in the ecological restructuring of journalistic practice in the Crescent City, Boyles maps three phases in the development of new “accountability reporting:” competitive chaos, territorial exclusivity and, finally, collaborative newswork. In the need for resilience and relevance after the crisis, New Orleans’ news ecosystem “effectively stumbled into the practice of slow journalism, which reordered practitioner routines in the digital age.”

A context of economic and media crisis in Spain provided the ground and motivation for journalists who lost their jobs to become entrepreneurs and start their own media outlets. This is the background of Alejandro Barranquero Carretero and Garbiñe Jaurrieta Bariain’s (2016) case study of Jot Down Culture Magazine, “an ode to slow production,” and one of a new network of slow journalism publications that have emerged in Spain since 2008 (Journalism Practice 10.4). Their analysis explores the innovative business model of Jot Down along with its collaboration and distribution experiments with these other start-ups, including a pooling of expertise to revive the historical Spanish newspaper Heraldo de Madrid, which had been closed since 1939.

Crisis of a different kind was the motivation behind the crowd-funded slow journalism start-up De Correspondent in the Netherlands, a perceived crisis of quality journalism under pressure not only from the demands of commerce and speed, but from the traditional norm of objectivity. In his case study analysis, Frank Harbers (2016) situates De Correspondent’s rejection of objectivity, and its embrace of a more personalised, engaged and transparent approach to “the news,” in a broader context of postmodern ideas about the social construction of representation and knowledge (Digital Journalism 4.4). Its founder, Rob Wijnberg, has built De Correspondent around the principle that “the truth” can be constantly updated. He calls this slow journalism. Moreover, readers are part of the journey towards truth and its contestation, especially as De Correspondent’s journalists are encouraged to be open in the writing and research process about their passion, frustration and interpretation about the topic at hand.

It becomes clear in many of the contributions to this double special issue that slow journalism has been emerging in alternative spaces, away from the mainstream of big media. The question is how these new practices of slow journalism can be funded. David Dowling (2015) investigates “The Business of Slow Journalism” by examining the revenue models of a number of start-ups (Digital Journalism 4.4). There is no one business model that emerges, but a suite of creative and innovative for-profit approaches that often avoid display, banner or pop-up advertising, but utilise crowd-funding, brand sponsorship through events, creative agencies, native advertising, subscription and, for print, high cover price. Dowling writes: “In a news ecosystem increasingly dominated by advertisers who entice media organizations to provide free content, most Slow Journalism publishers instead believe readers would be willing to pay for stories written according to this higher journalistic standard.”

Slow journalism is not just about words, be they print or digital. David Burnett is a photojournalist who, for the past decade, has been practising his craft using a 60-year-old Speed Graphic film camera to produce celebrated work of “a significantly different aesthetic” in an age where everyone is a photographer, and most professional photojournalists are expected to produce speedy digital photographs. Andrew Mendelson and Brian Creech (2016) explore the possibilities of slow photography for journalism in their study of Burnett’s work about, for example, Hurricane Katrina, the Sochi Winter Olympic Games and the survivors of Pinochet’s reign in Chile (Digital Journalism 4.4). “The use of film is more than just an aesthetic or technological choice,” they write, “it is a philosophical one as well, as its permanence, scarcity, and finitude place more pressure on the photographer to think about every frame and make it count.” The current conventions of photojournalism derive from a production routine that privileges standardisation. These conventions are critiqued in Burnett’s “acts of slow photojournalism:”

This is not the way news photographs are supposed to look. If conventional news photographs are declarative, stating definitively, “this is,” Burnett’s photographs force viewers to think beyond the “this is:” to wonder, question, and think about the subject. A slow and mindful approach to photography lends itself to a slow and mindful reception.

Slow photojournalism is just one element of the transmedia storytelling (TS) behind The Sochi Project, an ongoing multi-platform work of slow journalism that tells the hidden story behind the 2014 Winter Olympics, created by Dutch documentary photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist/filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen. In “The Sochi Project: Slow Journalism Within the Transmedia Space,” Renira Rampazzo Gambarato (2015) uses the principles of slow journalism and her own analytic model of TS to explore this complex project (involving interactive documentary, print media, digital publications, photographic exhibitions) (Digital Journalism 4.4). The Sochi Project began shortly after the Winter Olympics were announced in 2007 and Hornstra and van Bruggen plan to continue their work. This commitment to a project for an extended period of time is another aspect of slow journalism, although not shared by all practitioners. Perhaps the most ambitious project so far is that of Paul Salopek who is mid-way through his Out of Eden Walk, travelling the world on foot from Ethiopia to the southernmost tip of South America, tracing the pathway of human migration out of Africa. The walk took two years in the planning and began in January 2013. Along the way Salopek has been reporting in a wide range of modes: long-form magazine articles for National Geographic, videos, photographs, sound files, interviews, social media posts and detailed Milestones (“the editorial equivalent of a geologist’s core sample”) which are embedded on the project’s interactive map.

One aim of Salopek’s project is educational, and it is this aspect that Don Belt and Jeff South (2015) explore in their contribution (Digital Journalism 4.4). The Out of Eden Walk became the basis for a course taught by Belt at Virginia Commonwealth University, where students have been encouraged to develop a slow journalism walk of their own using multimedia storytelling skills. The detailed explanation of this innovative approach to teaching slow journalism is inspiring for journalism educators, and Belt’s course was the basis for a Pulitzer Center journalism education symposium in May 2015.

In pondering future research directions for slow journalism scholars, Erik Neveu wonders if slow journalisms are simply preaching to the converted, to a fractional public with high cultural (and economic) capital. It is a pertinent observation, and one often made about the slow food and slow living movements as well. Who has the time to slow their consumption of journalism and engage with longer, more complex narratives? And do consumers want to? Here, there is much work to be done. Nico Drok and Liesbeth Hermans (2015) offer a beginning with their research into younger Dutch news consumers, presenting the results in their essay “Is There a Future for Slow Journalism? The Perspective of Younger Users” (Journalism Practice 10.4). They found that while younger users do want news to be available quickly, mobile and for free, they also found that one in three younger users were interested in slow journalism—in-depth stories that provided context, that offered a greater variety of sources and perspectives, that offered solutions and opportunities for public collaboration. The next step in this area of research would not just be what readers say they want, but finding out what slow journalism they engage with and what meanings they make from it.

Another fruitful line of enquiry for future research is offered by Susan Greenberg, who sparked the discussion of slow journalism with a piece of journalism she wrote in 2007 (Greenberg 2007). In her prescient way, Greenberg (2015) takes our thinking about slow and journalism in a new direction by looking at the history of editors and editing practices in her essay “Editing, Fast and Slow” (Journalism Practice 10.4). Those of us who have worked as editors, be that the fast pace of editing online breaking news or the slower editorial pace of magazines, books and scholarship, know how much work is involved and how integral editors are to the final product, yet little academic investigation into the editors and editing practices of journalism has been done. Quality slow journalism and the editing it requires are “labour-intensive luxuries,” argues Greenberg.

For both reporting and editing, the way to survive and even prosper is to make the case for value. But while good reporting comes with a ready-made set of arguments about an informed citizenry and the public good, the case for good editing has been, to date, more fragmentary. If anything, editing has seen a fall in its cultural capital; positioned as it is by some new media ideologies as an oppressive handmaid of the mainstream media. As a result, the motivation to make room for high-quality editing, in the face of financial pressures, cannot be taken for granted.

Many of the contributors draw on the potential connections between the slow food movement and slow journalism. While an overly literal mapping of one movement (food) on to another (journalism) is not wise, there are principles from slow food that do indeed seem to bear parallels with emerging practices of slow journalism. The core slow food principles of “good, clean and fair” were first imagined as applicable to journalism by Harold Gess (2012). Another principle of slow food that bears promise for slow journalism research is the idea of “co-production.” For Carlo Petrini (2007, 165), the founder of the slow food movement, “co-production” involves a re-thinking of the role of the consumer in the production process. Petrini argues against the very term “consumer” with its connotations of “wearing out, using up, destroying, progressively exhausting.” Instead, he offers the term “co-production,” where the “old consumer” is actually the final stage in a more sustainable production process. “The old consumer must begin to feel in some way part of the production process—getting to know it, influencing it with his preferences, supporting it if it is in difficulty, rejecting it if it is wrong or unsustainable” (165). For slow journalism, “co-production” requires a new level of responsibility for the consumer of journalism, a kind of ethical and critical consumption of not just the text, but of the producers and their media organisations. This would demand of the readers or users of journalism a different level of media literacy beyond interpretation, and a responsibility to learn how the journalism they consume is produced and financed. But there is another step, another responsibility for the co-producer of slow journalism; and that is the preparedness to become a green media citizen, as Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (2012) so brilliantly explore in their field-shifting work Greening the Media. The slow green co-producer of media needs to learn about the environmental inputs and outputs of the media technologies they use.

Green consumers will need to be familiar with processes that take place behind their screens yet at some distance from their media use, such as the environmental impact of prior inputs to media technologies from the Earth, extracted via mining, logging, and drilling; and subsequent outputs from technology into the Earth from emissions into air, land, and water whenever a media device is made. (Maxwell and Miller 2012, 26)

While Maxwell and Miller do not explicitly talk of the green media citizen as a slow media citizen, there are fruitful synergies in their work for future researchers of slow journalism to explore. Can the concept of slow journalism be useful in elaborating and propelling research and awareness around the issues of media-induced environmental damage?

In recent decades we have witnessed what could be called a proliferation of adjectival journalisms: public, civic, citizen, new new, wisdom, knowledge, ethnographic, etc. The adjectives in themselves suggest that if there ever was a dominant singular version of journalism (which historians of journalism clearly refute; see Conboy 2004), that is patently no longer the case. The study of journalism was for a long time fixated on journalism as news, an unmarked term that saw every other type of journalism as a deviation that required marking with an adjective. That time in the field has passed. All journalism requires an adjective now and journalisms, as Barbie Zelizer (2009, 1) argues, are multiple. Journalism practitioners and scholars have entered a period of high experimentation and theorisation. Whether slow journalism continues to be a useful way of conceptualising and gathering together many of the diverse experiments against and in response to fast journalism remains to be seen. A number of contributors have referred to slow journalism as a “movement.” It is hoped that this double special issue will provoke journalism researchers and practitioners to further debate on this and other trajectories.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.