Interesting point. I’m not sure whether I would count The Economist as “slow news.” In some ways, they definitely are, since they don’t follow a daily deadline and since they distill a lot of larger stories from around the world into smart, big-picture summaries.

As my friend @bkavoussi said on Twitter, in response to this question: “Slow news, I think. The Economist deals with international trends and long-term issues that can’t be gleaned from any 1 event.”

But in some ways, at least some of The Economist seems to me more like a deliberate digest of “fast news.” How much of The Economist is original investigative reporting, never covered anywhere else? How much of it digs down into a subject that’s not being much talked about elsewhere, and produces new insights?

To me, “slow news” isn’t just the opposite of daily deadline stuff (although that is important), but involves certain approaches to newsgathering, as the “slow food” movement is about more than just avoiding fast food.

Then again, as @smelendez just noted: ” i vote slow. Reporting of places/issues others dont cover much, occas. long special features. Deliberately artisanal.” Which does sound like slow news (“artisanal news” being another good name for this.)

You write that “People love long form, ‘slow’ journalism.” Well, yes and no. Many of us journalists love it, and much of the public recognizes the social value of it. But if the public loved reading it as much as we love producing it, this conversation would be unnecessary, right?

In the magazine and newspaper industry, the long-form, “slow news,” serious stuff was already a rare luxury when I entered the field, my god, 30 years ago. A handful of writers got the opportunity to get paid big money to do this kind of work for glossy magazines or, maybe, at a top daily, after a long apprenticeship in the trenches. Those slots have dwindled but they were never exactly easy to find. A few of us got paid lousy money to do it in the alt-weekly world, where I got my start. But you could barely live on it even then.

The Internet has made the economics worse by breaking the old business molds. But it’s also allowed us to experiment in so many ways that were unfathomable before.

These, it seems to me, are the ways to support “slow news”:

(1) Don’t try to make a profit with it. Non-profit is a perfectly good model. You put bread on the table for the people doing the journalism, but nobody expects to make a lot of money, so there’s a little less pressure to make advertisers happy.

(2) Go for profit but be realistic and keep costs way down. Boing Boing fits in here; it has the low overhead of a non-bureaucratic, blog-style publication that’s only on the Web. If you can combine that with the level of passion and industriousness and frequent inspiration that you find at Boing Boing, well then, you’ve got something. If you start as a labor-of-love blog the way they did, then even if you don’t make the money — and most won’t — at least you’ve been doing what you love.

(3) Try to make a profit with something else. Cross-subsidy has always been the nature of the journalism business. That’s why the Sunday paper covers fashion and cars and real estate. The Web makes cross-subsidy harder to pull off because it unbundles everything. But I think we’re going to see interesting new kinds of bundles that reintroduce cross-subsidies in a more Web-native way.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the possibilities the network gives us to use all of these three approaches to support deep, rich journalism. I’m really not worried — though I, like you and everyone else, can’t say for sure where my income will be coming from five years from now. Good luck! We’ll all need it.