Issue 75 / March 2017

words, values “being first above being right”. For the Delayed
Gratification team, the answer was to take a lead from grassroots
movements such as ‘slow food’ and ‘slow travel’, and invest more
time in searching out each story’s nuances, in print, rather than
attempting to earn clicks at all costs.
“The parallel between slow travel, slow food and slow
journalism is that they are all about taking time to do things of
quality, and all of them are a reaction against doing things too
quickly,” says Orchard.
“When we launched in January 2011, the idea of slowness
being a virtue when it came to news reporting was an incredibly
niche concern. We were still very much in love with our
smartphones and excited about how fast everything was being
updated. But in the last six years, we’ve seen people getting sick
of that.”
Delayed Gratification’s cure for that creeping nausea is a
handsome print-only publication reliant on subscribers to cover
its costs. It has succeeded in building up a loyal readership that
pays for its pleasures – no mean feat in a digital world that
demands most of its content for free.
“We were incredibly gung-ho about the whole thing,” admits
Orchard. “We just thought if we can sell enough subscriptions
in advance, we can fund the print for issue one. We really hadn’t
thought how we were going to survive from issue two onwards.”
But six years later, Delayed Gratification is still here, giving
subscribers a combination of in-depth articles and fascinating
infographics that benefit from something that most news
publications can never have: hindsight. It is also beautifully
designed, almost begging to be plucked from the shelf.
“I think 60 or 70 per cent of the success we’ve had has
come from it being a beautiful piece of work,” says Orchard,
“and we always put a huge amount of time and energy into
things like the infographics. That’s been one of our real unique
selling points.
“We said early on that we wanted to have a serious news
publication, to address serious issues, and we wanted to report
from places where there are interesting things going on. But
looking around at the majority of news publications, they have
quite an earnest, drab aesthetic. And there’s no need for that to
be the case. You can actually make them beautiful.”
Not that beauty is the most important aspect of what
Delayed Gratification does. Being committed to truth telling is
also pretty crucial.
“I feel like this fake news phenomenon is almost the best
possible advertisement for slow journalism,” says Orchard.
“You’ve got people with a purely commercial agenda high-jacking
the news reporting of massively important and influential events,
and just spewing out bile and hatred. And because our former
gatekeepers – journalists and editors and so on – are so reduced
in status, and because we’ve got these networks that can spread
stuff immediately and which prioritise the more aggressive and
outlandish stories, we’ve got a perfect storm.”
“Delayed
Gratification makes
a virtue out of being
late to every story”
There is no obvious solution to this problem, and Orchard
admits to being “desperately worried”. “We’re a fun little
publication and we can keep going. We’ve got a group of
subscribers who will support us and hopefully we can grow that,
but the big mainstream publications need so much more in terms
of resources to keep doing what they do, and I’m not sure where
that’s going to come from.”
Orchard’s outlook may be bleak, but at least his team is
doing its best to provide a unique alternative – a magazine
devoted to considered, intelligent insight wrapped up in
superlative graphic design.
And so what if it’s permanently late to the party? In news
reporting, as in so much of life, we all know the best things come
to those who wait. !
Words: Damon Fairclough / noiseheatpower.com
Photography: Thomas Gill
slow-journalism.com
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