Column
In praise of the slow update
News does not need to arrive every second. Some of it is better left to settle overnight.
My grandfather read the paper twice a day, once at breakfast and once after supper, and he was the best-informed man I have ever known. He did not know things first. He knew them properly. By the time the evening edition reached him, the rumours of the morning had been checked, the numbers corrected and the quotes put back in their context. What arrived on his doormat had been allowed to settle. We have lost that, and I think we can have it back. Not by reading less, but by reading in editions: a morning and an evening, a beginning and an end, with the corrections printed underneath where everyone can see them. The news will keep. Most of it, anyway. Let it settle.
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