What is Slow Journalism?

What is Slow Journalism?

These new news websites are filled with bulletin news prepared by the agencies. The economic equivalent of the period was that the media organizations held in place, and even it is a period of decline. Some alternative media that want to get out of the economic vortex organizations include long news articles in narrative form on their news pages. Existing journalism institutions are also seeking to tell news stories in new ways. They have started to transfer these stories to the digital space by using multimedia elements. (Duman,2020:26) Especially the small newsrooms are having lots of troubles because of the economic status that’s been occurred by the big news agencies have and their domination in the media.

What is aimed with slow journalism practice is not only in times of crisis, always and its depth, looking after the professional path, quality and the news obtained in the referral to attract your attention obviously, and will drive the reader is to create stories. Increasingly meta-data in our age more coverage is needed. (Apak,2021:331) During these times of fast journalism is so popular we must also consider its negative effects of it. In our daily life people like us, mostly the young population is spending a lot of time in social media and web-based news sources such as the social media accounts of the agencies and some freelance journalists and the ones that are not “professional” journalists but decided to give information to the people from the online platforms.

Slow Movement and Slow Media Concept

Kundera (2018) defines speed as a form of trance gifted to man by the technical revolution in his work named 'Slowness'. According to Kundera, after man transferred his speed ability to the machine, he surrendered himself to an objectless, immaterial speed. The pioneering work of the Slow movement, which emerged as a rebellion against speed in the global age, was seen in Italy in the early 1980s. The Libera e Benemerita Associazione Amici del Barolo community organized in the city of Bra, located in the Piedmonte region of Italy, and the subsequent Italian Cultural Revitalization Association (Associazione Ricreativa Culturale Italiana/ARCI) movement are the first organizations for this movement (Petrini, Padovani, 2012:19). The Slow Movement started exactly when food writer Carlo Petrini founded the 'Slow Food' movement in Rome in 1986 against the fast-food culture surrounding the world.

Rapid production and consumption processes in the global age have also been the starting point of the Slow Media Movement. The slow Media movement has been a media consumption movement that opposes high media production and consumption in the age of digital technology. Beginning from 2010, slow media examples started to emerge at the local level in various countries around the world. The ‘Slow Media Movement’ argues that media production should consist of media that has been extensively researched and is widely available.

Some countries with lots of news going on such as Turkey are filled with disinformation and misinformation because of how the web-based media is flowing so fast. In the first time of using social media platforms around the world for publishing news stories, it was for a good cause but still, it’s a topic that’s discussed. As we remember the Arap Spring that started in Egypt in 2010 people started to use social media for publishing news around the country and making people informed.

If we return to the topic, in the post-digital culture era, the reader is faced with a wealth of information that is in front of him every minute. Slow media is a method developed in response to complex media forms and instant communication methods due to their characteristic features. It helps the public to understand the whole topic with details because of “slow journalism” it must take some time to make research and confirm the details by reliable sources.

-Ata Ahmet Kökçü

-Emirhan Enşan

Resources

•       Carlo Petrini & Gigi Padovani, Slow Food Revolution (2012)
•       Dilhan Apak, Pandemi Döneminde Yavaş Gazetecilik: The Guardian Gazetesi Örneği (2021)
•       Kenan Duman, Yeni Medyada Alternatif Ekonomik Model Arayışları ve Yavaş Gazetecilik:     L’ora Del Pellice Üzerine Vaka Çalışması (2020)