Take the background paragraph. It ill-serves everyone. If you know nothing about an ongoing story, it gives you too little history and explanation — how can you possibly hope to catch up on, say, the war in Syria in five lines of type? If you know a story well, this paragraph merely wastes your time and the paper’s space; readers have had to train themselves to skip over it and find the spot where current information picks up again. The background paragraph is a compromise demanded by the one-size-fits-all constraints of news’ means of production and distribution — that is, print.

Freed from those limitations, what should the background paragraph become? A link, of course: a link to an ongoing resource that is updated when necessary and not every time a related article is written.

via The Article is Dead. Long Live the Article. — Geeks Bearing Gifts — Medium.