I've been having very similar thoughts recently, but I've come to a very different conclusion. I agree with the author that the news article is an archaic way

I've been having very similar thoughts recently, but I've come to a very different conclusion. I agree with the author that the news article is an archaic way of transmitting history in real time. The solution, in my mind, is a new medium--something between a news article and a history book. This requires two changes. 1) We need a free, user-friendly platform for organizing and navigating news stories. Basically, we need a Google News that is actually interested in the original mission statement--“to organize the world's information [in this case, data about current events] and make it universally accessible and useful.” Looking at the Google News of today, you'd think their mission statement was to be the Drudge Report. It should be trivially easy to put together specific sets of news articles, but it's not. Say you want to see a list of every NYT, WaPo, and WSJ article that mentioned Trump in 2016. Should be trivial, right? Or maybe you want to see a list of every article referencing Jeff Sessions in the lead-up to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia collusion probe? Good luck! I've been searching for a neatly organized, searchable and free news database for awhile, and I've had zero luck. But there are only a few thousand articles coming out of reputable publications every day. It strikes me as utterly bizarre that past news articles are really not all that much easier to parse through than there were in the era of microfilm. I think there are millions of would-be fact-checkers and meta-journalists out there who would love to organize the daily deluge of news data and battle fake news in forums across the internet. They just don't have the tools. 2) We need to end the tyranny of the news article. Let's say you want to learn about Watergate. Would you pick up the NYT archives and start reading every Watergate article you could find? Of course not. It wouldn't make any sense to re-live the slow, confused trickle of facts in real time. You wouldn't know which articles were biased, confused, or outright misleading. You would be piecing together your own narrative while using shoddy data. Instead, you go straight for a book. Leave it to someone else to collect the relevant facts and tamp down the spin and the confusion! They'll even sprinkle in a healthy dose of background data for context, and weave it all into a neat narrative. It might even be entertaining! When it comes to the news, we need something that's closer to books than a news article. We need folks who follow events in real time (facilitated by tools like I mentioned in point 1), collating facts, and maintaining clear, coherent narratives, instead of dumping facts into the real-time, disposable media that is news articles. Of course, reading a history book while it's being written sounds awful. But I'm confident that there is a happy medium.