Where is the news for people living with dementia?
The world does not become less interesting after a dementia diagnosis.
Governments change, scientists make discoveries and football teams win. Events across the world become part of everyday conversations.
Yet much of the news is not written with people living with dementia in mind.
Search for “dementia news” and there is plenty to find. There are stories about research, treatments, services, policy and diagnosis. This reporting matters, but it is mostly news about dementia.
There is much less news designed for people living with dementia.
The news can be hard work
A conventional news story can ask a surprising amount of its reader. It may begin halfway through an event that has been unfolding for months, with little explanation of what happened before.
People appear without introduction. Acronyms go unexplained. Dates, statistics and unfamiliar places can arrive quickly. Often, the reader is expected to remember yesterday's news.
These are familiar conventions of journalism, but they create cognitive work. Dementia can make some of that work more difficult, including remembering information, concentrating and following a story.
The answer does not have to be less news. It can be news written differently.
What if the news did more of the work?
A story can provide the background needed to understand what is happening. People can be introduced clearly, unfamiliar terms can be explained and names can be repeated when that helps.
Unnecessary details can be removed. Events can be presented in a logical order. Clear headings and uncluttered pages can make the story easier to navigate.
None of this changes what happened. It simply reduces the amount of unnecessary work required to understand it.
Clear does not mean simple
People living with dementia are adults with their own knowledge, interests and experience. Accessible journalism should respect that.
It should not avoid politics because it is complicated. It should not remove uncertainty from science because it takes longer to explain. Difficult stories should still be difficult when the facts require it.
The world is sometimes complicated. Good journalism makes that complexity understandable.
The challenge is to keep the complexity that belongs to the story and remove the complexity created by the writing.
Better news for more readers
This approach can help people beyond dementia.
Anyone can open a story without knowing what happened last week. A reader may be tired or distracted. English may not be their first language. They may have a cognitive or intellectual disability. They may simply prefer news that gets to the point.
Designing news with people living with dementia in mind does not mean creating news only for people with dementia.
It means asking journalism to be clearer.
A different kind of news
There is plenty of good information about dementia. There is still room for news designed for people living with dementia from the beginning.
News that assumes the reader is intelligent, but does not assume they remember yesterday's story.
News about politics, science, sport, culture, technology and the wider world.
That is the idea behind The Clear Weekly.
The world does not need to be made simpler.
It needs to be clearly told.