With Hurricane Milton looming, Florida's NPR stations went text-only online

Not just the web. Gemini and Gopher did an astounding reduction on proxied sites.

Such as gemini://gemi.dev/cg-bin/waffle.cgi

Open any linked site, or enter your own. Just try with Ars Technica.

Head to the bottom, and compare the size of the converted Gemini page vs the original HTML one.

As for the client, you can try Lagrange.

https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

For news over Gopher (they will work on Lagrange too) you can try gopher://magical.fish, the NEWS link has tons of links to major news sites' RSS converted into Gopher.

EDIT: magical.fish is now down, but you can reach these:

gopher://codevoid.de/1/cnn