How much of your headspace should Donald Trump be taking up?

Let’s assume, for a moment, that you’re not a fan of his. You didn’t like his first term, and you’re worried about many of the things he says he will do. In other words, you see his presidency primarily as a threat to be monitored, not a chance for change you can believe in.

So should you be spending your every waking moment tracking his every statement, his administration’s every move — as many people in this situation did in 2017, much to the benefit of news publishers’ bottom lines? Is this a moment for informational vigilance, for eyes clamped open, A Clockwork Orange-style? Or is that the path to mental exhaustion, fuel for a neverending cycle of outrage and anxiety? Is it better to spend the next four years touching grass and assuming that, when your attention is truly needed, the news will find you?

Vox is staking out a very particular spot on that spectrum, the one that stretches from Info Omnivore to News Hermit. Yesterday, about 90 minutes after Trump took the oath of office, it debuted a new daily newsletter called The Logoff. It offers an unusual value proposition for a news product (emphases mine):

The Logoff is a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Every afternoon, we’ll send you an as-short-as-possible explanation of the most important news of the day regarding the new president. It’s not a hidden argument. It’s not an anti-Trump screed. It’s aimed at explaining, in the simplest and most efficient terms, what’s going on and why it matters.

Sometimes, these explanations will explain developments that are dominating the headlines. Other days, when the headline conversation is devoid of significance but there are substantive decisions happening outside the headlines, we’ll redirect you to what matters most. And when there’s no meaningful news at all, we’ll tell you so.

So why are we calling this “The Logoff”?

In addition to helping you manage the torrent of Trump news, we will close every edition with something — a video, a podcast, a story — that will help you refocus your thoughts away from Trump, and into a more productive headspace as you log off for the day.

Is that a pitch for a newsletter or a meditation app? (All it’s missing is instructions on how to pace your breathing.) Publishers have always worked at multiple levels of depth and complexity — serving everyone from occasional headline-scanners to the news addict. But The Logoff seems to go farther and acknowledge that many people view political journalism as a kind of informational pollution that needs to be managed.

I reached out to The Logoff’s creator and daily author, Vox’s senior politics and ideas editor Patrick Reis, to get a better idea of how he’s thinking about these thorny questions, and happily, he found time among the day’s zillion executive orders to get back to me.

“The idea is to present political news in a deeply accessible way,” he wrote over email. “Now obviously that’s not a recipe for maximum traffic. But our bet here is that it’s a recipe for maximum understanding and, with that understanding, reader loyalty. That’s what we’re aiming for.”

Reis says he’d gotten used to people, if he mentioned his job, replying with some version of: “Oh, I don’t follow the news anymore. It’s too much for me.” And indeed, news avoidance has moved squarely to the center of journalism research and practice since, oh, January 2017, give or take.

Until roughly the rise of CNN in the 1980s, it was legitimately difficult to be overwhelmed by the news, for it to be “too much.” Newspapers and the nightly news slotted into specific windows of attention — and no matter how much happened today, you eventually read the last page or heard ol’ Walter say “And that’s the way it is.” They were finite; they ended. The internet, not so much.

Reis thinks the once-a-day timing of The Logoff can provide a sort of permission structure for stepping back from the headlines. “So much of the first Trump administration was trying to understand his actions in real time,” he said. “He’d make an announcement, and we’d all rush to cover what he’d said. Then, an hour later, it would come out that what he said wasn’t representative of what was happening, so we’d all rush to cover the gap between what he’d promised and what he’d said. And then he would deny he ever said what he said, and we’d all rush to cover that. And in the end, we’d end up basically where we started, but we’d have put readers through several rounds of whiplash in pursuit of being ‘first.'”

The Logoff is a bet that you can profitably skip all those steps before the last one. “I’m working on patience, on waiting to see if what Trump says rises to the level of ‘news’ — ‘news’ defined as ‘information that readers need.'”

And he really means it when he promises to let you know when there’s no meaningful news to report. Trump will generate headlines every day, sure, but will they all be important enough to share? “What I’m promising readers is that I won’t take more of their attention than I think the news of the day requires. I’m not looking to monetize their attention to sell ads or drive traffic. I’m looking to make good on my promise of facilitating understanding of what matters.”

Of course, choosing to limit one’s attention to the Trump administration could be considered a luxury good — something less available to the people most directly impacted by its policies. But despite what a news org’s chief pageview counter might think, more attention doesn’t necessarily mean more understanding. “A multi-hour Twitter doomscrolling session — and believe me, I’ve subjected myself to plenty of those — doesn’t leave me with a better understanding of what’s going on,” Reis says. “You hit a point of diminishing returns or even negative returns.”

That philosophy seems like a natural fit for an outlet like Vox — built around the value of explanation and journalism that’s maybe a quarter-step removed from the news cycle. (And one that recently put up a paywall — though The Logoff isn’t a subscriber-only newsletter.) Reis says his target audience isn’t the slightly harried news junkie — it’s “people who might be tempted to tune out the news, to offer them a healthy, productive way in.”

Personally, I haven’t figured out how my own news consumption patterns might be different in Trump II than in Trump I. (Other than spending 95% less time on Twitter.) But I’m sure there’s a market out there to be served by products like The Logoff. The daily roundup newsletter is nothing new, of course, but there’s power in the framing you present to your audience — and “We aim to make you 10% more sane for the next four years” is a hell of a pitch.