The trouble is your first and second categories conflict. If someone is about to be appointed to some office the citizenry may want to weigh in on it. If a disaster occurs then people may want to donate money or volunteer to help victims. A product review of a product not yet released can inform the decision of whether to buy an existing product or wait for the new release.

The actual problem is with 24 hour formats reporting things they don't actually know. Which happens because there is an ongoing story with ~15 minutes a day of new information, but just repeating those 15 minutes of information all day will cause you to lose viewers who leave the news on all day and don't want to hear the same thing over and over whereas reporting other stories for the rest of the day will cause you to lose viewers who tune in at random times looking for specifically that information. So they try to report "new" information about the most popular story all day even when they don't have any.

There is a fairly obvious solution to this, which is to discontinue broadcast reporting and provide news on demand. If you want to know the latest on the lost plane, here it is; that story will stick at the top of the page until people stop clicking on it but nothing new will be posted until something new is actually known.

Then let people create custom news streams like channels on streaming music sites: If some news happens with the missing plane then make that the next story in my stream, otherwise give me news about NSA surveillance, then protests occurring locally, then tech product reviews, etc.

Can't it be done simply by checking out...

-Local events site

-Wikipedia's world events page once a month

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015#Events

The problem with actionable news is that you have to allow some individual(s) to make the decision for lots of other people what is actionable. Chances are you have someone in the audience whose creativity is greater than the filter's and could have figured out an action that was overlooked.

With old news, it does seem like there's a class of news subjects that are picked before ripe in a sense, and it'd be great to stop doing that—but stuff like disaster news is probably best to keep reporting as soon as possible...

"Allowing some individuals to make the decision for lots of other people" is the purpose of a representative democracy. It may not be ideal, but it's necessary because of the size of the group and the logistical nightmare of implementing a pure form on such a scale. Which is, I think, the issue to which this article is a response.

This is a separate question from how to organize our government; the notion of 'representative democracy' doesn't apply to news (at least in the proposed or present form).

The problem with news, as described in the essay, is that it's mostly not useful. The above solutions talk about ways of filtering it in order to make it more useful. Filtering, however, isn't the only way of solving this problem. For example, you could keep all the information available but categorize and label it, or impose some sort of hierarchy. Of course options for doing that are limited (though not exhausted) in traditional, non-interactive mediums—but that's probably a large part of why communicating it in an interactive medium instead is the current trend. Which obviously comes with benefits of de-centralization when done via the internet.

I think the solution is, as in the article, to stop consuming traditional news sources; there are intrinsic limitations to informational organization in a static medium. Instead, grab something interactive where you can select what's relevant to you.

> the notion of 'representative democracy' doesn't apply to news (at least in the proposed or present form).

I think it does. Serious news publications are de facto appointed representatives of the public, to hold politicians and officials to account, with their influence largely decided by the number of people who buy their newspaper.

> "Allowing some individuals to make the decision for lots of other people" is the purpose of a representative democracy.

Lots of forms of government do that. The purpose of democracy is to provide a more graduated use of force spectrum for countervailing force than 'get screwed' or 'civil war' to attempt to keep those decisions roughly in line with what the electorate would choose were they in that position.

Results vary.

Wow the "old news" idea blows me away. I really, really want that.

You would probably really enjoy Delayed Gratification. It's a quarterly publication that wraps up global news day by day from 6 to 3 months prior (e.g. the March issue covers Oct/Nov/Dec). They have a great mix of short and long form articles and I think a reasonable balance for world news.

http://www.slow-journalism.com/

I use http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/top/?sort=top&t=month for that. Most news are ~20 days old. I check it about once or twice a month.

In my opinion The Economist does a pretty good job of waiting for more concrete information before publishing any story. They never do 'breaking-news'.

If you like the sound of second one check out 'The Week'. It's a news Magazine that comes out once a week. It's the only paper news I read.

or Time, Newsweek, The Observer, etc. The weekly paper has been around forever exactly because of it's ability to condense and review the week's news.

Actionable news: Ryot is doing this. I've never paid much attention to them but they've hired away people from other media companies I do follow.

Sooo... volunteers to make these? They sound like great ideas. Not sure how you monetize, as ads are sort of antithetical to the notion of clean, BS-free news feeds, and we're all trained to expect content to be free these days.