The News Isn’t Broken — Its Architecture Is

How was your year?

I ask because it’s the season when news outlets recap the highlights and lowlights of 2025 and predict what you’ll care about in 2026. The former is an easy way to fill time and space when the newsroom is mostly on holiday leave. The latter requires less reporting and more opinion. Sandwiched in-between, maybe you’ll find something genuinely useful.

One thing you’ll see in 2026 is news outlets retiring all those blueprints and explainers — the add-ons that were supposed to help audiences digest and make sense of a story. That was the theory. In practice, most of them were badly executed. Many simply repeated, verbatim, what the story already said, doubling its length and wasting the public’s time.

And those explainer breakouts? If the storytelling doesn’t offer perspective on why the story matters, then why was the story even done in the first place? How about this: maybe it doesn’t get published or broadcast (remember those days?). Maybe it needs a rewrite. Most definitely it needs a re-edit. News will say there’s no time for that. So they go with it, then spend lots of time wondering why they are losing audience share.

Architectural Review

If there’s one thing I’d like to see in 2026, it’s the news media rethinking its concept of time, as well as its architecture. Newscasts have been following the same format forever. How about we rethink that — especially since the media landscape has changed dramatically in the last 25 years — instead of relying on AI to help out and shovel more information no one needs into our lives even faster?

The blueprint and explainer ideas were great in theory, but their execution missed the point — and now AI is tracking along these lines. The stark difference between the promise of theory and the disappointment of execution happens a lot in news — but it happens in life, too. It’s not a news problem; it’s a people problem. People want to organize their workloads into tidy boxes. News is more like water. Handling it requires a different sensibility.

Take what leads a newscast: public-safety issues. In theory, that’s a good thing. In reality, it becomes every local newscast opening with a house fire. It’s the house fire that becomes the architecture, instead of the issue. When every newscast starts that way, you’d think someone would say, “Maybe we’ve fallen into a rut.” Instead, a memo goes out saying, find a bigger fire for next week. That’s architecture in the driver’s seat.

Back when The New York Times produced a weekly Long Island section, there was a spot — usually the lower inside corner of the fourth or sixth page — that somehow became the home for car accidents. It was always just a few inches of copy, perfect for a transactional brief, which is exactly what an accident is.