Anyone can open up Twitter and instantly know what the world is gabbing about from minute to minute, all day long, across thousands of electronic sources that are instantly available all over the globe.
But we don't get the journalistic criticism of the coverage, who's doing it better, who's more thorough, etc. We're still missing that.
That enterprising writer could read the papers the moment they went online in the wee hours, summarize their lead stories and other juicy pieces, and post this briefing on Slate before the paperboys could toss physical copies onto driveways in Middle America’s cul-de-sacs.
For me, it wasn't so much the summary, but who was it that had the best coverage. It was the comparison of the coverage. I read most of the particular stories anyway.
As a matter of recourse, some students in the study “read the news laterally,” meaning they used sources elsewhere on the Internet to compare versions of a story in an attempt to verify its facts, bias, and ultimately, its credibility.25
This reminds me how much I miss the old daily analysis that Slate use to do for the day's top news stories in various outlets in their Today's Papers segmet.