So a deeper (but still simplistic) answer is this:
If you have Alice and Bob who are light years apart, and then both share an entangled particle. If Alice just does a measurement on the particle and its in state "1", she knows that Bob's particle is also right now in state 1. Neat....but not useful.
To actually communicate, Alice has to be able to direct the particle to be in State 1 or State 2 as a simple binary example. And unfortunately, the forcing of that state breaks the entanglement (called decoherence).