How much of the news do you really need to know? If you really need to know it, someone is usually willing to tell you for the benefit of having told you. Why do junior scientists give the papers they have just read to the boss? Because the boss will reward them and will see they are reading the journals. They only give the boss the ones they know he wants to see.

They feed him exactly what he needs to know because they know they will be rewarded.

Similarly, gossip works this way. People ferret out things about local people which influences the social network and spread it in return for favors or appreciation or reputation for being influential or at least in the know.

People need lots of information, but most of it is useless to anyone else - things like 'what is the deadline for this project at work?' This is not 'newsworthy' and will never be so. But it makes up 99.9...% of what we really need to know.

Sometimes we all need to know something - and then the rumor or news spreads like wildfire person to person. Twin towers coming down; hurricane on the way... the media can speed this news up and provide a repository for more information, but often first notice is word of mouth.

So what ends up in the news, if most of it isn't important to most people? Some is news to 'some people' - to politicians, to day traders, whatever. Some of it is 'evergreens' - how to clean a wine stain. A little is investigative - but that falls into the rare 'big news' and the news to a few people. Some is just people up on a soapbox (op-ed).

The evergreens will eventually move to web-references more and more. They will be there when you look for them.

News to 'some people' is actually best managed by specialist publications for different groups. We might see a NY Politics or a NY Food or something come out as sections of a paper split up.

Then there are the few pieces of real 'everybody' news - and they tend to show up on the Front Page. Perhaps then, we'll see the NY Times and its ilk become two or three page sheets - half ads, seen by everyone. Add to that the soapbox for the occasionally important opinion (ex-presidents pontificating about world affairs and the like) and you could make a very profitable paper. And a short one. Sometimes, like the BBC used to do on TV, it could even say 'sorry, no news today.'