For centuries the cost of distributing information polarized publishing between books, which were comprehensive and timeless, and newspapers, which were essentially diffs of information in books. Centuries ago, as today, understanding a newspaper was impossible without a lot of background knowledge, although back then you were more likely to have this context, your leisure options and reading choices being quite constrained.

The cost of printing and distribution, and in particular the cost of books, constrained the availability of material that might bridge this gap and educate readers about topics that were both vital and complex  — information that was a bit timely and a bit deep, with a medium shelf life, neither entirely fresh nor perfectly comprehensive. This sort of information, with the potential to quickly educate the citizenry, particularly as society grew ever more complicated, tended to get published only when there was a particularly strong political or commercial imperative to justify the cost. Revolutionary era pamphleteers, door to door encyclopedia salesmen, and independent product guides like the Whole Earth Catalog come to mind. 

For some reason, 25 years into the age of widespread internet use, we have only begun to disrupt this paradigm. In fact, news has proliferated online, and in this medium tends to provide little to no additional background information as compared to print, offering an occasional hyperlink that provides precious little additional context, and mostly contemporaneous context at that (that is, news articles tend to link to other news articles or to press releases or the like). Many of the new information forms that have emerged online only serve to heighten the importance of news or even more ephemeral information: Aggregators like Reddit (adding only importance ranking and brief comments), social networks like Twitter and Facebook (heavy on opinion and personal moments), and the democratic cinema of YouTube (tending toward the viral and off-kilter). Books, meanwhile, seem to have changed very little online, although their digitization has made them more conveniently available, and, arguably, slightly widened the number of authors of which a given reader avails herself.

This state of affairs is odd, given that the web was created by a scientist with the specific complaint that “keeping a book up to date becomes impractical,” in particular when organiziing “general information about [nuclear] accelerators and experiments,” which would seem to envision a platform that accomplishes quite a bit more than circulating newspaper articles.

But if you’re attentive you can start to see examples of how the web can foster new forms of information that go further than news in educating citizens, providing a deeper understanding  on a range of topics before, or in the absence of, relevant books. To wit:

• Wikipedia - A resource that is both criminally underfunded and routinely underestimated but which nevertheless dominates both the Google results and reader mindshare for any given topic. Why? Because it takes the time to go deeper (and thus more educational) than news; because it organizes by topic rather than by what recently happened; and because it has relentlessly honed a useful system for harnessing the work of a distributed team of volunteers (the sort of work news organizations would be wise to engage in more often).
  
  
• StackOverflow - A network of sites that has brought about nothing short of a revolution in how software engineering knowledge is exchanged. The site was consciously designed (per the podcast made by its creators as they created it) to foster knowledge with a considerable shelf life, information that for months or years would surface on Google to help programmers looking for solutions to their challenges. The system of software, rules, and human moderators used to make this happen is so consciously attuned to this goal that it is routinely criticized for being so strict as to border on unwelcoming. And at times the site fails to keep pace with the rapidly churning world of software libraries that have become central to applied computer science. But no one has argued that StackOverflow failed to achieve its primary goal. Its business model, the last time I checked, revolved around helping tech companies hire engineers.
  
  
• Wirecutter - A site that creates product guides with a shelf life of approximately one year and which has changed how many people buy things online. Wirecutter has become so widely used and imitated that it’s easy to forget that this format had to be invented, and invented at that by Brian Lam, who as editor of Gizmodo had overseen the production of a great many reviews with much narrower scope and a much shorter shelf life. After he retired from Gizmodo to Hawaii he made a site with a much more laid back pace and, relatedly, with more depth and educational value per article.
  

I think we are going to see more sites that fit this general mold — medium shelf life, between books and articles; greater depth and educational value than news articles, but less than books; relying more on expertise and less on reporting. This is the part of the web, and of publishing, and of the digital world, that really excites me right now. It is where we as a society are going to heal some real systemic weaknesses and build some real strengths. And how we will finally end the tyranny of news.