But where do I start if I don’t have all the time in the world and want to meaningfully engage with the news?

This is an interesting perspective to me. There are only 7 blurbs in that Washington Post screenshot, plus another half-dozen headlines — that does not seem like a lot of information to digest in a moment to me. One of my gripes with Web news has always been that it fails to deliver in one page anything like the breadth and depth of information that a print newspaper’s front page does.

With regard to the question of where to begin: editors put things they think are most important/emergent in large type — I don’t know how there could be any confusion/misunderstanding over this. Where to begin, though? That’s up to you! I don’t want news serialized for me, I want a wide field (visually, as well as topically) of information that I can move over with my eyes, side-to-side, up and down, and then drill-into when my interest is piqued.

Web news is lousy at providing that. The Washington Post’s layout, like most major news sites, gets worse as you scroll down the page. It just devolves into stacks of headline links, sprinkled with pictures. There should be a lot more text on a news site’s front page (blurbs at the least! — a couple of leading paragraphs would be better), not less.

We can certainly agree that there’s something lacking in the presentation of Web news, but I would deviate from your thesis a bit and say instead that news in 2017 doesn’t need to follow the hamstrung designs of Web news in 1997.