David Taylor, editor of Tortoise, on slowing down during breaking news

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Three weeks ago, Britain saw a historic news event with the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Predictably, newsrooms everywhere went into a frenzy.

But this kind of complex and often uncomfortable stories tend to turn off news audiences. Half of UK and US audiences are selectively avoiding the news, citing the negative emotions it often conjures up as one of the main reasons.

Tortoise Media is a three-year-old slow journalism startup. Instead of chasing breaking news, it focuses on quality, explainer journalism to help the overwhelmed audience make sense of the news agenda.

True to its word, when the Queen passed, it had a comparatively modest offering poised for the world.

It published a six-part podcast called The Second Elizabethan Age, an all-you-need-to-know dive into her reign and how she shaped society. It was downloaded 100,000 times during the mourning period alone.

Tortoise also held three of its signature live Think-In sessions inside its newsroom that helped the team discover which stories to run.

In this week's podcast, editor and partner of Tortoise, David Taylor, explains how the team came to decide on what its audience truly needed to hear during this time. We explore the rationale behind these stories and why podcasts have proved the purest essence of slow journalism. Tortoise has recently secured a £10m investment to expand audio and that new firepower was put to the test in the last month.

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