Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #180 - News From Afar

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - News From Afar

We live in a world of instantaneous news. Buried under newsfeeds, posts, legacy media TV stations showing 24/7 news reports. The main issues are that each has an agenda, will spin or hide news according to what they want us to believe or think.

But in the past, it was different. News came on ships, by camel, or passed by word of mouth from town to town. That meant the local and trivial got filtered out, or was changed - literally Chinese Whispers. It might take months for news to reach Europe of a great earthquake or plague in Asia.

How does news travel from far places in your fantasy or scifi setting ? Is it carried by travellers, or purveyed by professional media ? How much do governments or other authorities impact what news is passed on, and how ? What are the limitations - bandwidth, human memory, censorship, or maybe the limitations of faster than light travel. Tell me a story of how all this changes what news people see and hear, and how it affects their lives !

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.
• AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
• Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂