The most frustrating thing to me about the news media is that it's always current, it's always on the bleeding edge. That might sound a little counter-intuitive, so allow me to explain.

When you read about something that's happened recently, there might be a little bit of background information along with it. That background information is there to serve the new stuff, not to tell the whole story necessarily. To save time and space, news sources often assume you know a lot of the background information already.

Imagine trying to compile a complete picture of some event or issue. In the past you'd have to dig through newspaper archives, go through the stories, take out the stale information that was correct at the time and replace it with the facts as we know them now. It's a lot of work to keep up with an entire story as it happens.

It's also frustrating when you want to know how something turned out. Yesterday you read an article about a 20 car pile-up on the 401. What happened to those people? What caused the accident? To find out, you have to find the last article written on the subject, hoping it will provide some answers. If the event happened over a week ago, good luck!

Well, the media might be changing. What if a news article could change as the facts were exposed or the event continued? You'd not only be provided with up-to-date information at any time during the event but by the end you'd have a pretty good summary as well.

Television and print media have the disadvantage that their news delivery is a snapshot, it's what we know right now. The reports cannot be updated, only re-reported as long as it's interesting -- the news is a business after all. The original reports or newspaper articles live on forever as snapshots of time, even though later on they may found to be incomplete or inaccurate.

The internet is starting to change the rules of reporting and wikis like Wikipedia are a great example. Consider the Wikipedia article about the recent race riots in Australia. It's constantly being updated with information from various sources and at any given time gives a pretty good summary of the events that have transpired. I was equally impressed with Wikipedia's coverage of Hurricane Katrina and many other current events covered on Wikipedia.

Let's not forget that Wikipedia has its faults and shouldn't be considered a primary resource of information. But these summaries are great for people that want to catch up with a particular story right after it happens -- before the documentaries come out explaining the whole thing in detail. Just don't believe everything you read. :)

It would be great if a trusted major media company, like the CBC or CNN, wrote updated articles/summaries like this for major news stories. Sure, they'll update their articles online but they'll write a new article the next day.

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Yep, this does relate to FanConcert, where I'm compiling information about artists/bands. The information about future events can be the news. The rest becomes sort of an encyclopedia-like resource of what's happened with that artist. Today's news is tomorrow's resource.