Briefest

Briefest is for people who want a brief news summary but struggle with anything more. It is designed to be quickly read, and then left, focusing on actual news, not bluster.

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We believe the news is ...

Manifesto

News is unexpected

Some things in life are sadly predictable. News is the other stuff: things with an unexpected magnitude, motivation, or implications. There's no point emulating almanacs and calendars.

News is neither prize or punishment

Events don't deserve to be in the news solely by their moral weight. Terrible and wonderful events may become newsworthy due to their impact or unexpectedness, but nothing earns its position by moral status alone.

News is events, not words

Most reporting is what powerful people have said, often their threats and promises. Most of these do not come to pass; many were never intended to. They were spoken to threaten, cajole, or entice, usually through an emotional response, such as anger or fear.

This can lead to (often intended) catastrophising, which is what drives many people away from the news. It can be difficult sometimes, but Briefest tries its best to concentrate on the here and now.

Sometimes people worry that not knowing intentions can reduce their ability to respond. This is true, but front-page news rarely helps with this. Leaders of causes uses sources beyond the scatter-gun approach of headline news. They need a single-mindedness and analytical precision which it lacks. As for followers and supporters, once a movement has become significant it has already become more than mere words.

News can sometimes gain attention for a cause. Many people struggle to read the news not because they are blasé, but because they have already significantly contributed to, or been affected by the issues it reports. Others lack the capacity to assist, and the worry it induces makes their life more miserable. There is no universal right to attention.

News is not violent entertainment

Although we accept limits on the violent imagery used in news reporting, it is given considerably more licence than elsewhere. While it may be true that some people would benefit by being shocked by the world's brutality, a much larger section are numbed, or propelled into anxious inaction.

In many news outlets, the use of violent imagery had become little more than an excuse for prurience; an extension of True Crime entertainment. This is advantageous for sites based around impressions and attention.

It is truly amazing is considered acceptable news imagery in pucliv with so few safeguards for the vulnerable (for example, in service stations, airports or banks).

News is not fortune-telling

Much of what at first appears to be news is actually fortune-telling: searching for a certainty in the future which does not exist. Who might do what and when? What's going to happen to us in a month, a year, or a decade? The justifiable reaction to such hankering is to resist it, not to pander to those suffering.

Where action can genuinely by taken, it is important to plan for the future. But the focus should then be on that present-day action, not on fantasy futures.

For example, although predictions of a “demographic timebomb” may not in themselves be news, the establishing a new fund or visa regime, or revelations of structural deficits, may well be newsworthy.

(Authoritative bodies such as government statistics offices publishing careful, significant, and surprising predictions from well-founded data may, in a very few cases, be newsworthy, but even here care must be taken that this isn't an excuse for exploitative attention-farming of future catastrophes).

News is a thing that can wait

News is rarely as urgent as it seems. Not only does a delay allow a perspective to develop in the reporting, subsequent events can clarify and contextualise an event, or allow multiple events to be reported succinctly.

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