Swap ten headlines for one long article a day

Most of us now meet the news as a stream: alerts, headlines, a paragraph here and there. It is quick, and it feels efficient. I am no longer convinced it leaves us better informed.

A headline is a claim without its evidence. Ten headlines are ten claims. By the end of a scroll you have a vague sense that something happened, and often a strong feeling about it, but little idea of why it happened or what happens next. Ask yourself, after a morning of scrolling, whether you could explain any one of those stories to a friend who missed it. Often the honest answer is that you could repeat the headline, and not much more.

There is another problem with the stream. It rewards what is new rather than what is important. A minor development that happened ten minutes ago will push aside a major one from yesterday. The result is a picture of the world that is always changing on the surface and rarely explained underneath.

The case for depth

A well-reported long article does what a headline cannot. It shows its sources, explains background, includes people who disagree and admits what is still unknown. It takes ten or fifteen minutes. It also tends to stay with you.

Depth also changes how you read everything else. Once you understand how central banks set interest rates, say, the next headline about a rate decision is no longer a mysterious number. It slots into a framework you already have. Our explainer on what inflation is and how central banks fight it is an example of the kind of piece I mean: something you read once and then draw on for months.

Long reading is also a kind of protection. Misleading claims spread most easily in short form, stripped of context. A reader who habitually goes to the full story is harder to fool.

The strongest objection

The best argument against my proposal is that headlines are useful precisely because they are fast. In a genuine emergency, such as severe weather or a public health warning, you want the key fact immediately, not a feature to read later. And no one has time to read deeply about everything. Scanning headlines, the argument goes, is how you decide what deserves your attention.

I agree with most of that. Urgent alerts have their place, and I am not suggesting anyone ignore a warning to stay indoors. Nor am I suggesting you stop glancing at headlines altogether. The problem is not the headline as a signpost. It is the headline as a destination: the habit of treating a scroll as if it were the reading itself. Use headlines to choose. Then actually read what you chose.

There is also a fair worry that long articles can be padded, slow or self-indulgent. Some are. Length is not a virtue in itself. What matters is whether the extra words carry evidence, context and explanation. If an article is long without being informative, stop reading it and find a better one.

A modest experiment

For one week, try this:

1. Once a day, pick a single story that matters to you. It might be about your work, your area or a subject you have always wanted to understand.
2. Read it to the end, without switching tabs. If it helps, set aside a fixed slot, such as with your morning coffee or on the commute home.
3. Skip the alerts in between. Keep one or two for genuinely urgent news and silence the rest for the week.
4. Summarise it in two sentences. Say it aloud or jot it down. If you cannot, that is useful information about the article, or about how you read it.
5. At the end of the week, compare. Ask yourself which approach left you able to explain the news to someone else.

My bet is you will choose depth. And you may find the news a little less exhausting, too, because a story you understand is far less unsettling than a stream of fragments you do not.