If you dig Vannevar Bush, check out Russell Neuman's Future of the Mass Audience if you've never picked it up in your travels: http://bit.ly/gXRCJ

Digesting eight years of stories from one town sounds incredibly masochistic. The problem, I think, is that you're expecting linear connections where there might not be any.

What if a different reporter covers a beat when the regular one is out sick? What if a topic goes 3 months without advancing, and then there's a brief update that assumes previous knowledge, or worse, that attempts to summarize a complicated issue in a single graf because the reporter only gets 4 inches to fit this bit into, and then that poor summary becomes the logic that the next reporter on the story hangs their derby on?

I think it only gets worse from there.

(Pretty sure that just *proves* the need for better topical archives and consistent taxonomy that makes it easier to string together information of any content type over time, plus the production of "stories" in content types other than the one called "inverted pyramid," right?)