I feel like ex-Buzzfeed-guy Ben Smith’s Semafor is trying riffs on that theme in a couple of ways. In their big reported pieces they seem to like to packaging together mixed forms of reporting, coupling straight-reported factual summaries with editorial “views,” prognostications, other organizations’ reporting, and forward-looking timelines.

The effect is pleasantly like the sort of dense, brief topic subscriptions you mention, in a weirdly retrospective kind of sense. The best way I can think to describe the effect is that it feels like having subscribed to the story’s notifications a year or two ago, before I knew I’d be interested in it.

They use a similar technique in their “Signals” products. I’m not sure how they’d describe those, but they seem aimed less at hard reporting and more at delivering context and background by threading together paragraph-sized summaries of mainly other institutions’ reporting.

Circa was definitely ahead of its time, and never quite replaced.

The anti twitter/reddit/facebook. And also an anthesis to something like wikinews.

The powers that be need to revisit the idea of organizing information in a way that stories get appended and built upon, instead of each new piece of information being a new post in an endless firehose.