Four Slow News Years
[Image: A Scholar in his Study (detail), by Thomas Wyck.]
Since I started Slow News in January 2020, we’ve had a pandemic, an attempted coup by the president against the government, a giant war in Eastern Europe and perhaps an even bigger one brewing in the Middle East.
My contribution to commentary on these and other events has been 50 posts in 2020, 20 in 2021, 23 in 2022, and 16 in 2023. For that entire period, I’ve questioned the value of the project. I personally feel happy about the pieces I’ve written, in which I try to bring out background information for the news which I think is important and either not discussed in sources I see on the web or not presented as well as it could be. In many cases, a post will center around a few graphs or infographics summarizing statistics or other information which seems essential to understanding what is going on. Often if I am arguing – er, discussing – about politics with people on the internet, I find that the same point comes up over and over, and its easier to just link to my blog than to start writing the same thing over again.
Often it feels that a point I’ve made transparently clear doesn’t register with the other guys because they don’t bother to click on the link.
And that’s the rub with blogging. I like doing it, but is it worth the effort I put into it? It takes from a few hours to a day to do a post. Twenty posts a year aren’t running my life, but it’s not a trivial effort either. Hostgator tells me that there’s something like 100-200 page views a month. That’s probably an order of magnitude more people than I personally talk to about any of this stuff in a month, so I guess its an amplifier of sorts. But I don’t think Vox is going to be calling any time soon.
I had also hoped to get more people – friends and acquaintances – to send me stuff to post, but so far I’ve had exactly one post I didn’t write: my son David’s piece on Ukraine. Interestingly, I don’t think he showed anyone the post on the blog, he just emailed the text file to friends of his he thought it would interest.
The format for a successful blog (that is, one that people read) is to focus on one obscure topic that can attract a dedicated audience. So these general news topics are pretty much lost in the noise. A consultant from my web host said it wasn’t even worth doing much for search engine optimization because the stuff I write would be invisible compared to better known sites. There are probably hundreds, or even thousands, of people I’ve never heard of writing blogs on current events that could be at least as insightful as mine. Heck, I’m not even the only physical scientist living in Maryland who thought up his own alternative calendar (though mine is better!).
The rule is, if you thought of it, someone else already did and put it on the internet, right?
A Quick Stroll Through Slow News
The first year of Slow News started with pieces I had written previously, including my essays on the Munich Agreement and the demise of the Soviet Union, some fun pieces about Julie Andrews and the Wizard of Oz, and some other political stuff. I was really happy with the foreign policy essays, but unfortunately I don’t think a single person has agreed with my conclusions in them.
As the listing shows, 2020 was dominated by covid and the 2020 election. I wrote thousands of words explaining what I found disturbing about Trump, but many people will have their own personal experiences of how fruitless such exercises were. Some of the covid pieces I wish I had tried to get published in something with a wider reach. I felt I didn’t have the expertise to justifying sending it anywhere, but lots of amateurs wrote about disease in 2020.
The next year continued the themes of 2020, with the aftermath of January 6 and the winding down of the pandemic. I was very happy with my two Covid pieces in December, where I lay out really clean arguments against claims that Covid wasn’t that bad or the vaccine wasn’t that good. Of course, people who believed such claims weren’t going to be convinced by anything I wrote.
For me, the news in 2022 was dominated by the invasion of Ukraine, but I felt like I didn’t have that much to add to the discussion. Just before the invasion I posted one of my GDP-population plots showing the comparative economic strength of European nations. I still look back at that plot and scratch my head at NATO’s inability to use its vast economic power to overwhelm the Russian war machine. I also wrote a piece “Taiwan is Not Ukraine” which makes arguments relevant to many articles I see in the news. Not much else on Ukraine though. Many of the other pieces that year were influenced by the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, along with random topics on the theme of Republican political extremism on the court, in office, and in the media.
Finally, 2023 had the fewest posts of any year. with a couple of long pieces (mine and David’s) on the Russian invasion and a bunch of posts on the Israel/Palestine conflict. That year maybe had the most random set of topics, including topographic maps, Arkansas, and Janis Joplin. Well, the other years had some random ones too, such as my piece on pillow talk in my household about Lagrange Points in outer space.
So What?
My topics these four years have certainly tended to choices that one or two (million) other people were also talking about. So besides fretting about writing for a small readership, maybe I should be thinking about whether these posts were worth reading. Maybe I was just scratching an itch, a hobby that is, at least, more or less innocuous but maybe not so useful to others. For many of my posts, I feel like I can explain what was useful or different about my particular take on a topic, but its possible that my posts look to me like they are giving especially good answers because I am the one asking the questions…