Helen Boaden, preparing to leave the BBC and her last top job as head of radio, delivers a panegyric to what she calls “slow news” – which “embodies impartiality, accuracy, expertise and evidence; the things which take time and resource”. And, of course, no one can argue with such a list of great and good virtues.
But slow news has one other pervasive characteristic: slow means slow. The instant BBC alert on my mobile phone often tells me of some news break I knew 20 minutes or two hours ago. The pace of BBC TV news, with its habitual visits to widget factories near Swindon discussing the issues of Brexit, can be slow, going on catatonic.
Digital is there to move fast, fast, fast. That’s part – only part – of the whole news picture. Maybe it’s a bit sparse, frail or wobbly when it arrives. But speed is the essential, unavoidable nature of this beast.
