As I've noted before on HN, one issue I have with many text-only news-site presentations is that the presentations are really poor, and cognitively taxing.
Taking as an example CNN's website (listed in TFA), it consists of 100 headlines and just the headlines, presented without organisation, in a long flat list.
There's no grouping of similar topics, no context 'graphs for the story, just a flat list. If you like your feed utterly random, power to you, I guess, but ... I prefer a bit more order.
This current HN submission reminded me I'd written a set of scripts to address CNN specifically, taking advantage of the fact that much of that context I missed was actually encoded in the URLs (a subject classification, for example), and could be used to create, if one so felt, a subject-grouped newspaper-like layout.
I've dusted off the scripts and figured out how to run them (there are several chained together), and ... yay! it still works!
The result looks like an 18th century newspaper layout: dense, all text, no images, and of course no advertising or social link-litter, with a brief lede for most stories, and a story index on the top left of all stories, by section.
Screenshots and more discussion at Mastodon: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>.
I'd submitted this to HN about a year ago though with little traction: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723661>.