Hi! I’m considering creating a “Slow News” / “Slow Journalism” community but it seems Beehaw doesn’t allow users to create new community. I’m guessing this is one of Beehaw’s Lemmy customization aiming to keep the discussion civil, possibly to avoid creation of toxic communities. Is there a process to request creation of a new community? Or is the community list fully locked and static?
In any case, here’s my pitch for a new community: “Slow News” refers to a stream of information and recent events that is intentionally slowed down, in the spirit of the Slow movement.
Rationale : The spread of real-time medias (radios, TV, Internet) accelerated the pace and increased the amount of news articles published. This may be detrimental in some aspects, with an information overload for the readers, and a race to publish breaking news first. This often lead to bad quality journalism due to the pressure to publish fast with limited verification and zero investigation.
Slow News’ aim: Go in the opposite direction and literally slow the publication of news to allow readers to consume information at their own pace, and to give more time to produce better quality, investigative journalism. Slow News media outlets favor long piece article, typically published at a slower rate. This is also known as Slow Journalism.
Slow News community: It would be focused as exclusively as possible to sharing slow news articles, preferably long piece investigative journalism. Moderation would have be stricter than a typical News community as it would limit publication of article that don’t fit the slow news concept: breaking news, article about developing events, sources that have poor reliability or bad track records due failed fact check, fake news.
Nice one! I think you might be able to achieve similar result with customizing news title/body – by including a phrase or hashtag and post it in regular news community.
This way the news community will always have content and your posts will be nicely searchable / recognizable. At the same time other news posters might get inspired by higher quality of posts and adopt similar specific practices.
If there’s enough content to create a brand new community, am sure there will be a place for it
Thank you
If I had to venture a guess, the reason you’d like it’s own community, as opposed to posting slow news style articles in the existing news community is that you do not want to see traditional style news. Is this accurate? Or is there more that I’m missing.
I don’t really care about owning that community, it’s mainly beaucause I haven’t found such community yet on Lemmy.
This idea came following my experience sharing various articles on another Lemmy instance, which I won’t name to avoid brigading. I made an effort to verify the sources I share are reliable and not too partisan, which others user do too. But some users spend time posting propaganda pieces or from really unreliable sources, dismiss fact checks as being propaganda themselves, and mods didn’t seem to mind or care. So I felt like I wasted my time there.
The concept of slow news sounds like it could avoid these pitfall, by raising the standard for everyone. It may block some decent news article that don’t fit the criteria, but I hope it’d help block most of the crappy news source and propaganda. So you can read a community without spending too much time checking news sources reliability, and reading through partisan propaganda hoping to find good journalism somewhere in between.
I understand. I’m certainly open to the idea, but I do want to mention that we don’t think propaganda pieces are particularly useful or relevant on this instance. If something is posted to news with bad sources, we’re more than willing to remove it. In fact, we would like you to report it. Fact checking websites are not propaganda.
I have a decent idea of where you may have been participating and understand your concern. We have blocked several lemmy instances which we believe do not act in good faith and are not concerned with being nice or inviting to users and care more about enforcing echo chambers.
Beehaw does seems like it got a saner approach to social media, which is why I just moved here. It’s possible this instance’s approach already avoid most these pitfalls. A couple things seemed surprising at first (no downvotes, no user-created community) but reading through the introduction post explaining the rationale I can see it how it’d avoid brigading and clans forming.
Anyway I think Slow News is a nice concept for multiple reasons (push toward less infobesity, less propaganda, hopefully more factual and reliable) but as you said I could start posting Slow News to an existing community. Time may show whether a decidated community makes more sense.