| HN Mirror

The fast part isn’t for your benefit, primarily, and news media would love to go slower and have more time if they could, and still survive. The race to break news first - in order to be the one to tell their audience something “new”, something they hadn’t heard elsewhere - is real and it has been around for all of modern civilization, for hundreds if not thousands of years. A one day turnaround was a thing purely due to daily newspaper print runs being the fastest distribution, it wasn’t because it was long enough to get it right. The reason they had a day is because the competition couldn’t get something out faster than that. Then for a while there were twice daily print runs to be more competitive. Then the internet came along, and now the only way for a site to get attention and be talked about on Hacker News is to report it before any other sites do.

There are some news media that do go slower and take their time, but I think they’re struggling to stay alive. Reuters is still reputable, but they no longer necessarily take a day. The big question is how do we get humanity to prefer slow & correct over fast, and it is even possible? When you hear about an earthquake in Venezuela, how do we stop people from Googling it immediately, and get them to wait for the best most correct story rather than reading whatever’s available now? In the case of natural disasters, I don’t think it’s possible anymore, no matter what case you make. I’m not sure it’s possible with stories like AI distillation either, even if you can absolutely cement the case for slow news. The fact that it’s async/internet now and that first still counts means we (you and I) are still going to give traffic and attention to sites that have the first information on a breaking topic, statistically, despite having a preference for correctness over speed. The one thing we can do is vote with our dollars by subscribing to whatever news media that does a better job than others.