Vol. 11 No. 21 (2024): Slow Journalism: style, contents, new formats, and audiences
Coordination: María Ángeles Chaparro Domínguez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Sonia Parratt Fernández (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Sandra Marinho (Universidade do Minho), Tania Gentic (Georgetown University).
In contrast to breaking news, slow journalism proposes content that invites reflection, based on a process of slow production and consumption, where both content and form are taken care of. Transparency, in terms of funding and production routines, is another characteristic of this type of journalism (Le Masurier, 2015), along with proximity to the public (Rauch, 2018). They are projects that move away from fast-food journalism, of accelerated creation and consumption of information (Rubio Lacoba, 2010), or from churnalism, which consists of publishing journalistic pieces based on press releases (Davies, 2008). These bad practices in the profession, together with other factors such as the current global impact of disinformation, largely explain the loss of trust in journalism. According to the latest Digital News Report, less than half of the population (40%) trusts the news (Reuters Institute, 2023). In the face of this growing loss of trust, slow journalism offers authorial journalism that provides serenity and context, based on verified sources of information.
Slow journalism has traditionally been related to literary or narrative journalism in written form. Numerous investigations have studied this type of journalism in Spanish-American and/or Spanish magazines (Zabalondo et al., 2022; Peñafiel-Saiz et al., 2022; Barranquero-Carretero and Jaurrieta Bariain, 2016), although some have addressed it in other countries such as the United States (Cheng, 2023). However, in recent years, journalistic experiences with the characteristics of depth, high quality and stylistic richness typical of slow journalism have been developed in other media. For example, in the field of sound, narrative non-fiction podcasts could be considered a manifestation of this type of journalism (Mehendale and Jaggi, 2023). Not surprisingly, the future of slow journalism will depend on its adaptation to these innovative formats due to new digital consumption habits (Manías-Muñoz et al., 2023).
In short, it is a consolidated journalistic specialisation, which can help the media to distance themselves from false content and thus recover lost social trust. This monograph attempts to cover a large part of the ramifications it presents in terms of topics, formats, media, business models and audiences addressed.
