Speed Over Truth Erodes News Standards Accuracy, impartiality, context, and depth have been sacrificed as being first eclipses being right. MailOnline prewrote verdict stories on Amanda Knox and, after mishearing “guilty” for slander, published the opposite of the truth with invented scenes and quotes. For minutes, the world’s biggest English-language news site carried a fabricated account. When Amy Winehouse died, about 20 million tweets spread the news within an hour, outpacing every newsroom and pressuring reporters to abandon time for verification.
Algorithms, Ads, and PR Are Reshaping What Gets Reported With revenues collapsing, outlets slash staff and pay—El País cut 128 jobs, U.S. newsrooms shed 31% of reporters, and the Guardian lost £30.9m—even as readers stop paying but keep consuming. Low-yield online ads force a race for massive traffic, making Google’s top-three results lucrative and rewarding whoever is first rather than most accurate. Volume is prized, so journalists churn more stories with less time, squeezing out research, balance, and long-form depth. PR fills the gap—there are 4.6 PR people per journalist—and churnalism flourishes, with up to 54% of UK news copied wholly or partly from press releases. Hoaxes and speculation slip through, from the “drunk-only” Livr app to wall-to-wall, fact-light MH370 coverage.
Fast Coverage Forgets; Investigative Depth Withers Real-time saturation moves on quickly, leaving unanswered aftermaths—Soma’s mine disaster ceded attention to new crises, while the fates of miners, Sewol survivors, and kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls faded from view. By contrast, Watergate thrived on patience: two arduous years produced 40 indictments and a presidential resignation because a newsroom backed the work. Today’s hyper-speed and thin budgets make such sustained, complex investigations increasingly hard to support.
Automation Ascends; Slow Journalism Offers the Antidote Algorithms already write stories: the LA Times’ Quakebot turns USGS data into articles in seconds, and AP’s Wordsmith will auto-generate thousands of financial reports, promising efficiency but threatening jobs. Within a decade, printed newspapers may disappear as robot-written and social-scraped news, tailored to preferences and free, dominates, while preemptive pieces go largely unchallenged and quality erodes. Most will accept this, but some will seek journalism that values time, follow-up, perspective, and reporters at the heart of stories. Slow Journalism meets that need by rejecting ad-filler and PR rewrites, bringing unexpected, worldview-shifting reporting, and valuing being right over being first. Returning after the frenzy, it uncovers deeper truths—such as Soma’s miners being set against one another by political games over compensation—and delivers nourishment over noise.