Terrible Journalism & Interesting Statistics - Rob Orchard

... journalists come in in the morning and they're given a list of the stories that were trending online overnight, which is why, you know, these poor, poor buggers, they come into work and they're like, "Write, write something about this." "Who is this?" "I don't know." "It's an American celebrity. She was on some kind of series that you've not heard of." "Then what's happened to her?" "I don't know. She's breaking up with her boyfriend." "Who's her boyfriend?" "I don't know. It doesn't matter, just write something."

(wind blowing) Rob Orchard, welcome to the show.

Nice to be here, Chris. Nice to be here. Thanks very much for inviting me.

My pleasure. How do you describe what you do for work?

Uh, so I'm an editor. Uh, I edit a beautiful quarterly news magazine called Delayed Gratification, uh, which I launched, uh, with my co-editor, Marcus, back in 2010 with an idea of providing a sort of an antidote to knee-jerk, uh, Twitter-driven news reporting, uh, which doesn't give journalists enough time to really get to grips with stories. So we kind of go the opposite way. Once every three months, we produce a beautiful magazine, news magazine, which looks back over the big events of the quarter, uh, with the benefit of hindsight and asks the question of what happened next.

So that's slow journalism that you've coined?

(laughs) Yeah, yeah. So I wouldn't... I'm, I'm not gonna claim ownership of it. It's, um... You know, a lot of people have been talking about it for a long time, but I think ours is the first magazine, or ours was the first magazine to put a flag in the sand and say, "Yes, this is a slow journalism magazine." And the idea is it's a bit like, um, slow food and slow travel, right? So taking your time to do something of quality and, and kind of providing a counter, a counterbalance to sort of life getting terribly speedy and, and news getting terribly speedy and everything getting terribly speedy.

What's the big difference between slow and fast journalism?

Well, there's all sorts of different things. So what tends to happen in terms of the way that we, we, we process our news is that, um, it's coming at us from all directions. You know, it's on our phones. It's kind of quite often the first thing that we do in the morning, right? Instead of turning to our loved one, we turn on our phones. We, and we check and make sure nothing horrible has happened overnight. Um, and last thing at night as well, and throughout the day and on our socials, and it's, it's, it's kind of this, this white noise of news. And what, what tends to happen as well is that it moves in, in kind of cycles. So you get an intense concentration on a massive story for a few days, and then suddenly the news agenda moves on, and you're quite often left with a, the sort of the feeling of not having really got to grips with what the story was or, or wanting to know what happened next. Um, but, but, you know, the, the news cycle feeds on novelty, and so it's kind of constantly moving on. So to take an example, um, uh, Afghanistan, we were all glued to the story, um, over the summer in August, um, August 15th, the fall of Kabul and the, kind of the few days leading up to that and the few, few days after that. But since then, the coverage of what's been happening in Afghanistan has completely fallen off a cliff, um, and we happened to have in the next issue a very, um, a very well-written, a very well-considered piece from a female journalist who's been there for the last year and who, who continued, very bravely continued, didn't leave with everybody else, stayed there, um, and has got this incredible 6,000-word read for us, really getting to grips with what has happened in the country since then. So I suppose when it works well, what it is, is you open up the, the magazine or, or, you know, wherever you read it. You open up the magazine and you think, "God, yeah, that story. What the hell happened with that? I remember that." And we tell you, you know? And in amongst that, we also tell you the stories that you missed, and we have this kind of slightly cheesy line of, "The stories other missed or others missed or mistold." Um, so this idea of in the kind of the heat of, of, you know, like 24/7 rolling news, there's, there's stuff that gets missed and there's stuff that gets, that gets put out there, uh, wrongly. So this is ideally, in its best form, it's an antidote to that.