Why Go Slow? + Follow Us On Instagram and YouTube

We wrote a post called “Why Go Fast?” earlier this year because we like rolling out features quickly, and we’ve made a bunch of improvements large and small to our projects since we launched three months ago. Now, we’re doing video and recently posted about our improvements to Missouri Vehicle Stops, which now includes 25 years of data.

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Doing this got me thinking about a paradox: One of the main reasons we like to go fast is so that we can go slow.

We’re playing a long game with this Missouri traffic stop data. We planted a flag, we’re making connections. We’re not trying to be in your inbox every day or game the attention economy — we want to be available when we’re needed.

Sarah Alvarez wrote about this recently at NewsFix: “Speed, instead of need, is the currency” of the attention economy. She points to Outlier Media’s Profits and Losses project, which worked to inform Detroiters who experienced tax foreclosure about court-mandated money they were owed from the city’s subsequent sale of their property. They had a sixteen-week deadline from the time the relief was announced to the deadline for former homeowners to claim the funds, so they had to hustle and enlist an “army” of civic volunteers — but with a speed and cadence driven by real need and strategy, not by feeding the algorithm or wowing funders with slick packaging.

The savvy of Outlier Media’s project reminded me of when I worked on a project where a reporter had a brilliant analytical insight and was hellbent on a big, splashy, award-bait investigative package. The reporter spent an entire election cycle polishing the story (of course you have to have that dramatic, narrative lede), ignored chances to collaborate with other local journalists poking around the same issue, and missed the opportunity for their insight to shape political discourse in real time at a critical moment.

Their pace was driven by an assumption that depth equals quality equals prestige, untethered from anything actually happening in the public sphere. A smarter version would have been more sustained, not less: a campaign running through the election and into the first year of the new term.

In response to this and other protracted projects, the newsroom made a mirror-image mistake, setting artificial cadence goals without changing the process or anchoring the pace to any strategic factor. Going faster without reallocating resources, rethinking your product, or having a metric beyond “went faster” rarely works out. This is why, paradoxically, haste and sluggishness often travel together.

There’s another path that avoids this false dichotomy entirely: see your published work as a product, and combine fast iterations with long-game thinking based on real needs, realities, and outside input. True strategic timing means scoping plans to external constraints — observed audience interest, election deadlines, user feedback. Fast or slow, speed doesn’t automatically serve information needs.

The Profits and Losses project demonstrates a deep understanding of this kind of strategic thinking. They set up a brilliantly utilitarian explainer. They offered one-on-one assistance. They reported news incrementally along the way.

We are trying to follow the same principles, even though the cadence of our newsletter and especially the traffic stop data requires thinking in years and not months. We’re adapting based on what we’re learning: We have some real-world users now, and our improvements are driven by their feedback and insights.

We expanded the timeframe of Missouri Vehicle Stops and added Census identifiers after input and discussion with Jon Ben-Menachem, a PhD candidate at Columbia University using the data in statistical models for his research into sundown towns. We’re adding a download in a ”wide” data format because local groups, led by activist Donald Love, have traditionally used wide formats for easy desktop spreadsheet browsing. (The data is coming, Mr. Love!) We hope to add MCP support by summer, in part thanks to a suggestion from Jason Radford, managing director at the National Internet Observatory.

None of these folks came to us through a viral moment. They came because they were already working on something and the data fit. That’s the shape of the audience we’re building for, and it’s how we sidestep the attention circus — not by shouting louder, but by playing a different game.

Picture a researcher who sees the stop data once, bookmarks it, and moves on. A couple of years later, they’re deep in a project with statistical models broken down by Census identifiers, and our data would make a useful control. We want to be there when that moment comes—same for the government official pulling historical statewide trends for a report, the lawyer working up a motion, the advocate who needs a number for tomorrow night’s city council meeting, the reporter scrambling to provide context for a breaking story.

Reaching them is the hard part — and the hard part to fund. “Slow shoeleather organizing and outreach” doesn’t exactly send funders running to write checks. That’s a shame, because while the cost of maintaining the data is reasonable even at the miniscule revenue this project earns from paid subscriptions, the cost of making sure people know about it and use it is significantly higher.

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The word consumer comes from a Latin word that means to destroy, to eat, to diminish, to use up. This perception of people engaging with our work as “consumers”—for whom we must produce a continuous stream of content—defined the audience relationship in most newsrooms I’ve worked in.

At my previous job, the traffic stop data was treated as uninteresting precisely because it comes out once a year and doesn’t lend itself to a single clear narrative — if your model is consumption and splashiness, an annual release is a yawn, the same story warmed over. Even if that’s a story that affects hundreds of thousands of people every year.

In the consumer model, even the high-end journalism product is something to be used up and discarded. If it has an impact, it’s mostly because it landed with a splash and won the week that it came out, or maybe at best got some play over the course of the following few months. When these kinds of projects are done, journalists will say things like “I’m glad it’s over” and “happy I won’t have to think about that for a while.”

We see it differently. We’re happy to keep trucking. We’re not spent up. We’re building something together with our audience, inside a bigger ecosystem, for years to come. We’re not depleting our audience’s attention, we’re enriching it. We don’t want people to consume a simple narrative and move on with their lives — if they’re part of the admittedly niche audience that’s interested in traffic stops, we want them to return to this data, remix it, analyze it, discuss and propagate it, and be open to being challenged by what it shows.

When they need it, we’ll be there.