If the print newspaper were invented today, it would grab hundreds of millions of VC money in Silicon Valley as the cure for news overload. (I guess the pitch would have to include some silly AI or IoT angle though.)

If that was true, newspapers would have variable length. But they don't.

They fill in the same BS arbitrary number of pages day-in, day-out.

Edit: Downvoting as if this isn't self-evident?

(If they were set to a fixed number of pages, they wouldn't have the flexibility to sell more ads when there's a busy occasion such as an election...)

That have quotas that they fill day-in, day-out, and they add some additional pages based on special occasions (elections, some huge crime, attack, holidays, and such). But they will never give you e.g. a 12 page newspaper even if there is nothing happening. They'll use any BS story to fill pages.

There is also a part of the news that a well-informed citizen should know about. There are things everyone can do about injustice that require us to know injustice took place. Sadly, the above part of the news isn't the focus off modern news media. The sensationalist spin doesn't help much either.

What I'm trying to say is that news, in and of itself can be good, necessary even. The question is whether current forms of news do this well enough, and what other harm their sensationalism does.

Here in the U.K. the last three weeks have been endless repetition of media managed slogans and photo opportunities.

There are very real injustices happening in the world - in Syria and in Chechnya for instance - but they're routinely ignored unless you really go looking for them.

Seems like anything that does get reported is merely an opportunity to spin the narrative towards their ideological agenda?

How can you say they're ignored while admitting that you can find reporting on them if you look?

I find it ironic that people complain about the quality of mass media while simultaneously swallowing mass media's definition of what is and isn't important.

If you hate mass media, then you are a person who doesn't need to be spoon-fed news, right?

Of course this notion flies in the face of our dear leader, who hates CNN but watches it religiously. He seems to have convinced every far right person to do the same.

As for being a well informed citizen acting against injustice, I'd say there's a similar situation in that someone need not be very well read to find far more injustice than they're capable of acting on.

We live in a time of excess information yet have societal values that have developed throughout history when information was scarce. Passion, motivation, discipline and ethical principles are the things holding people back from being active, caring citizens of the planet not lack of information.

Humans aren't designed to cope with the whole world's problems.

For example, would you want to sit down now and read an analysis from September 2016 about who is most likely going to win the U.S. presidential election? No? Then similar pieces (trying to predict elections in 2018, 2020, etc.) are probably not terribly important to you. Would you read a piece from September 2016 about infrastructure issues in the U.S.? Yes? Then that's probably the type of article with more value.

Another would be to wait a few weeks before reading much about breaking news. Some years ago I read the paper daily, and it's interesting how many articles about the major stories are 80-90% the same from day to day with slight updates with the latest information. Better to wait and get the whole story than to get a slow trickle of news with endless rehashes of what you've already been told.

Periodicals that are less interested in breaking news and more interested in long-term stories are good in this regard.