While I get the "light year = distance" dead horse, however, I too agree with the concept of "what we see now isn't now" when looking at the sky. In our modern day instant now type of world, it is good to be reminded that whatever we consider epicly important right now, it's just a fleeting spec of nothing in the grand scheme. That's one of the things that I really love about astronomy. We are so utterly not important. It's a huge ego readjustment, or it should be IMHO. Feeling self-important, step outside, look up, and recognize your actual position. Gulp

While it's not LIFE and they know their audience, it's not an xarchiv release either. These types of stories could easily be the starting of a young mind to astronomy. While there very well may be an avenue for that, it would not be "bad/wrong/etc" for that in this type of release either. After all, these releases are PR.

That means first of all that they're somewhat more familiar with high school physics than "remotely familiar," and secondly that they also probably shouldn't tolerate factual inaccuracies such as "[new instruments] have now allowed astronomers to follow one of these stars, called S2, as it passed very close to the black hole during May 2018." Is that an inelegantly-placed prepositional phrase (since only the observation took place in May 2018 and not the passing), or do people in the field refer to these things in the present tense as a sort of shorthand? (I'm not one of them so I don't know.)

There are signs it's meant for a broader audience, e.g. "one of these stars, called S2" instead of simply "star S2" (since everybody's already familiar with it).

Or how about "The new measurements clearly reveal an effect called gravitational redshift. Light from the star is stretched to longer wavelengths by the very strong gravitational field of the black hole."

How often should experienced astrophysicists be subjected to the tedium of this explanation of red-shift? Once every 5 articles? I would say: Since it's a fact from their own field, they should be reminded of it less often than they get reminded of what was happening on Earth when this stellar event actually happened. Because if they're truly specialists, that means they probably know jack squat about archaeology/anthropology or anything besides astronomy/astrophysics, and might even appreciate the latter reminder.