People are short of time and want to feel they've skimmed enough news to feel up to date to catch cultural references, bluff their way through a discussion, or notice things 'on the radar' that might be directly relevant to them.
Reading full form journalism is great but if you had to do it for 100 news stories a day, your day is gone. And, right or wrong, many people want to get a breadth of information and then focus on a few parts of it, rather than solely consume a deep amount of information.
Newspapers used to fulfil this role quite well. You could "scan" a paper in 20 minutes and feel reasonably up to date. But "scanning" online is somewhat trickier because of the format. So these services seem to try and bridge that gap of offering you a ton of headlines and summaries all in one place.
Reading full form journalism is great but if you had to do it for 100 news stories a day, your day is gone. And, right or wrong, many people want to get a breadth of information and then focus on a few parts of it, rather than solely consume a deep amount of information.
Newspapers used to fulfil this role quite well. You could "scan" a paper in 20 minutes and feel reasonably up to date. But "scanning" online is somewhat trickier because of the format. So these services seem to try and bridge that gap of offering you a ton of headlines and summaries all in one place.