Introducing The Long News

April 21st, 02009 by Kirk Citron

[editors note: Kirk Citron proposed this idea of Long News to Alexander Rose, Stewart Brand, and Kevin Kelly a while ago. While we have not found funding for it, Kirk has valiantly stepped up to be the editor of the program himself to try it out and see if it has legs. Thanks!]

Each weekday, The New York Times prints around 125 news stories. That’s just one newspaper; add in all other newspapers, plus television, radio, and the internet, and it’s clear thousands upon thousands of news stories are generated every day.

But how many of these stories will make a difference next year? A decade from now? A century? Ten thousand years?

That’s the idea behind The Long News: to try to identify news stories whose significance seems likely to grow, rather than diminish, over time.

We will link to articles about trends, discoveries, and events that might have a long term impact on humanity — or at least, for several decades. We will try to spot stories which appear likely to shape the future, and that a future historian might some day look back upon as important.

To begin, we are launching The Long News as a category within the Long Views blog, for occasional publication as we find new stories which seem relevant. We are kicking off today with four links; and we invite you to submit additional stories here.

1. The transhumanist movement claims we may be able to guide human evolution; this article suggests we may have less control than we think: Modern life’s pressures may be hastening human evolution

2. Given the resources each new American consumes, this story (found by Stuart Candy) is troubling: Baby boomlet: US births in 2007 break 1950s record

3. A glimpse at the future of medicine — a possible new path to a cure for cancer: Experts use nanotech to deliver anti-cancer genes

4. In the future, science may no longer need scientists: Self-directed robot scientist makes discovery

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 02009 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Long News.

http://www.longnow.org Alexander Rose

Thanks for this Kirk. The first thing I am realizing that this will need is a strategy for preserving the content of the stories, as my experience is that news links only have a half-life of a few months to a few years. And that was back when newspapers had a funding model that still worked!
http://futuryst.com Stuart Candy

Thanks for taking this forward, Kirk. News is undoubtedly an area where slower/better needs to challenge and counterbalance faster/cheaper.
Jean-Francois Beauvais

Good idea, especially if those news are revisited from time to time to see if those really had an impact on the future.
http://davidpalmerstudio.com/welcome/losangeles.html David

This is a great idea, but I wonder if built-in time lag would help. Maybe take a first shot at predicting which stories have long-term effects, as you’ve done above, and then come back at different intervals (a year, ten, a hundred, etc.) and sort them into the ones that really did and the ones that didn’t. The misses could be just as informative as the hits.
http://www.futurefoundation.org Bob Citron

This is such a terrific idea! Many stories about the future will have little relevance to the long term (thousands of years) and they are mixed in with stories that may have major significance to the long term future of our species. Singling out those stories with long term significance and cataloging them for posterity is a great service.
http://sndtrks.wordpress.com sndtrks

Finally! Now I can officially claim “I just read it for the articles”!!!

LOL!
Vivian

Well, I thought this would be interesting but the story on human evolution was a total non-story, a complete waste of time. Can’t you do better than this? Sorry…but where’s the real story here?
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Alan Drummer

This is why I read the news! Thanks for doing this!
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog Michael Nielsen

This is a very interesting idea, and I’ve been enoying the posts. But a problem is that most news stories concern events which happened on a very short timescale (“Obama wins election”). The most interesting things in our society happen over longer timescales, and thus aren’t usually regarded as news in the traditional way. Stewart Brand’s observations about how cities are defusing the population bomb are an example: this is taking place over a generational time scale, and so isn’t really news in the traditional sense. Yet it’s far more important than almost everything in the news. Similarly, most major scientific discoveries are really cumulative events that take place over years or decades, and so aren’t news. This is part of why science news is so bad: at the timescale news operates at, all you get are fashionable incremental improvements, not news of what’s really important.
Adam

This website won’t be here in 5 years. Digital storage is tenuous and vulnerable. Good idea and good luck with future iterations.
http://bpk.deepdream.com/elsewhere/ flowpoke

This blog may evolve into something else but Im pretty sure the data that is present today will be accessible 5 years from today. I'll 'long bet' you that it outlasts your 5 year prediction. (;

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