slow journalism ILLUSTRATION: GARY NEILL


journalists. A new venture in the US called The Correspondent intends to push this further. Le Masurier says: “They are trying to put into practice one of the slow principles – of the journalist laying bare their processes for readers to see. They don’t believe in objectivity, so the journalist is open to any biases. They also want readers to be part of the research process and the initiation of story ideas, saying that 100 people know more than one journalist.” Open journalism is nothing new – journalists have long


sought varied voices and challenged inaccuracies with varying rates of success. As Orchard explains: “Slow journalism is simply quality journalism produced at a slower pace. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fast journalism, with reporters on the ground getting news stories. We couldn’t do slow journalism without journalists breaking news. On the whole, journalists do an exceptional job in tough circumstances for little money and it’s rare that we follow up a story and find wild inaccuracies. It tends to be more a case of telling what happens next.” Many slow journalism publishers proudly point out that


advertising takes a back seat to high-quality journalism, so funding has to be found elsewhere. Delayed Gratification, a quarterly print magazine, is reader-funded with no advertising or advertorials; it costs £12 per issue or £32 for an annual subscription and boasts a readership of 36,000. Tortoise, meanwhile, with cofounders former Dow Jones president Katie Vanneck-Smith and former US ambassador to the UK Matthew Barzun, is part financed by Bernie Mensah, the president of Bank of America’s Europe, Middle East and Africa business, alongside Local Globe tech investor Saul Klein and a further two anonymous supporters. Tortoise also raised over £500,000 in a Kickstarter campaign and pledges from 2,530 backers. La Masurier explains that the producers of Long Play in Finland were unpaid until winning awards attracted more financial support, Correspondent in the Netherlands started out with crowdfunding and Delayed Gratification has always paid its contributors and also generates income from training. Orchard says: “Slow journalism – and all good journalism –


Fast forward


In less than a decade, slow journalism has grown from a single publication in London to others across Europe, the US, Australia and Canada. Delayed Gratification


kicked off the genre, which is now finding new journalistic approaches, developing different business models, challenging news delivery and seeking to tell stories that go untold in the blur of modern media. Europe is home to a


number of publications, including L’Ora del Pellice and Il Salto in Italy. The latter, established with crowdfunding, was set up to challenge modern journalism,


which it asserts is “framed by strong economic and financial interests on the one hand, and the ‘do-it-yourself’ approach that leads to the proliferation of so called fake news on the other”. The Sprawl in Calgary,


Canada, is crowdfunded in part, ad free and pop-up - it is working with the Calgary Public Library on a pop-up newsroom. It carries out in-depth research into local stories rather than break news. Another online effort,


which engages social media, is seeing Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Paul Salopek on a 21,000-mile journey to trace the


migration of our global ancestors for National Geographic. The endeavour, described as a decade-long experiment in slow journalism, requests donations to fund the storytelling. In Australia, ABC is


reaching remote communities by spending time building contacts to gain trust, rather than sweeping in on the back of breaking news. The channel says its stories “would not have been told without this slow journalism approach, because reporters are usually time constrained and tied to the news cycle”. Without doubt, the


popularity of slow journalism is picking up speed across the globe.


challenges churnalism simply by being original, well-researched and fact-checked work. It’s not necessarily the case that people who are lured by clickbait wouldn’t buy a slow journalism magazine, but certainly our readers appreciate an alternative to the online news landscape, where the battle for readers’ eyeballs can leave readers feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.” Slow journalism perhaps sets itself a large challenge in


wanting to test new business models, reporting approaches and ways to share news with consumers, in an increasingly volatile and competitive industry. The slow journalism revolution has started and you’ll never guess what happens next … you’ll have to wait and see.


theJournalist | 17


ILLUSTRATION: NED JOLLIFFE


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