You've never conducted an interview via E-mail?

The Lost Fleet series, in which communication is strictly limited to C, tackles this problem. Communications are even more formal, because each party can take time to hash out a message, and then they have minutes or hours to anticipate the reply and plan out the rest of the conversation. Or get lunch. Or go back to running fleet simulations. Or take a nap.

: and
: communicating out-of-system would take years if not decades-- of course
: you could just use a faster-than-light mail ship*, carrying either paper
: or electronic media,

Just like what they were doing in Contact Harvest.

: but you'd still be looking at days or weeks as far as
: I can tell, which narrows down what stories you can tell.

Actually, it expands the stories you can tell into territory that Star Trek and Star Wars, by their nature, cannot venture.

: Besides, superluminal communication has been canon since Halo 2, it's just a
: matter of humans figuring it out.

When you get down to it, a telegraph is dead simple to figure out. It's just electrical impulses being sent down a copper wire, right?

I wonder why the Sioux or Cherokee never built their own telegraph networks.