I'm not sure why this is Hacker News, but I upvoted it anyway because, having read it, I find that Cornelius Ryan is now another one of my heroes.
I rate journalism among my passions, which is why I enjoyed this, but I added it for its relevance to the ongoing discussion about news media. Solving 'the news problem' with technology means blaming 'the news problem' on technology, and I think it's a far more widespread cultural issue where tech plays but one role.
"Meanwhile, The Longest Day was reissued in 1994 for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. It still sells—a fact that belies the glaring omission of Ryan’s work from so many anthologies of literary journalism, and also offers a powerful lesson for a trade trying to figure out what people will pay to read. There is nothing, it turns out, like a densely reported story propelled by the palpable sense of a reporter chasing his story."
"Over the years the trade had produced occasional flashes of inspiration in which a writer—Daniel Defoe, Rebecca West, Joseph Mitchell, W. C. Heinz, John Hersey—took a turn at bringing to a true story the qualities of fiction."
I'm curious why the writer ignored George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway - because they ruined his thesis?