The crowd was gathered for a discussion on "slow journalism," and Salopek's medium for joining the event spoke to the evening's theme of using new digital platforms to tell in-depth stories: He was Skyping from Tbilisi, Georgia, where he's waiting for snow to thaw before continuing his journey. …

"Slow journalism allows me to make hidden connections that you miss when you travel too fast," he said. "The world is complicated, and we require more than just short bits of information."

We in the media can be culpable of moving on quickly; the news agenda is by its nature a tangle of loose ends. One quarterly publication is dedicated to challenging this: Delayed Gratification describes itself as "the world's first Slow Journalism magazine, proud to be Last to Breaking News".

Honstra describes their process as slow journalism, and the material they've amassed has involved deep research and countless interviews. "For me, slow journalism is really the same as documentary. The starting point is always [to ask] why things are happening rather than what is happening. It is very important to have a substantial amount of time to investigate somewhere, then have more time to think about experiences when we come back."

This superbly written tract [What the Media are Doing to Our Politics, by John Lloyd] amounts to a call for "slow journalism" (in the manner of the Italian "slow food" movement). It subscribes to the Reithian assumption that the goal of the press is to create an informed citizenship and that "constant aggression or attitudes of constant suspicion" are as bad for the perpetrators as they are for the victims.