Seems like a personal problem for the media. Is the point of this article just to say what a shitty job they do on informing their readers about things that actually matter.
So -- what would make a social bookmarking service (reddit / machine-ranked news sites) more helpful? And, what would be helpful to a consumer of news? Would it be defined as, keeping the reader engaged and contributing to their suite of social causes (e.g. consuming media comprised of "40% Bieber, 30% Viability of the Planet, 30% Automobiles")?
To make the bookmarking service more helpful, a service could facilitate codifying topics' seriousness. Perhaps manually through a user generated voting/weighting scheme, e.g. "[X] This story concerns life-or-death issues for 10-20 million people."
Then once that information is associated with a subject, some smart agent could automatically carry this characterization around along with the user's surfing so that each article they read includes, in a side-bar perhaps, the "seriousness" of the subject.
Making it helpful is the hard part, for me. So, finally to "help", it could help the reader conclude the projected utility of spending the time to actually read any given webpage, and share reports about their 'budget' of time spend consuming media of their preference.
The problem is that certain persons of interest (cough The D) or crises (migrants, wars, financial crises) overload the media system, plus people who are poor don't have the mental capacity (or the will) to engage in this debate.
Also, many people just don't care, even if people are dying - at a local nazi demonstration, someone literally said "it's just ni..ers". Racism is well alive, especially when people don't have much left (e.g. after becoming jobless due to German reunification scandals) and right-wing politicians fuel the fire by telling people that refugees might steal their social aid or other cr.p.
Don't be fooled. Trump is the best thing to happen to the American "journalism" since CNN invented the 24 hour news channel. They shoe-horned him into a position to win, and now they'll milk his media-friendly tweets all the way to the bank.
It goes back to human nature (the way we focus our attention) and the power structures we have in place. I think decentralized power and decentralized media would solve many of the information access problems we have today, but the powers that be will do as much as they can to prevent that.
Social networks must have adequate human support teams capable of speaking the languages of the countries their users are, they must delete (or, as in traditional media, offer corrections to) fake/defamating posts, they must react to illegal content (e.g. hiding by country as Twitter does is pretty fair game to avoid the censorship debate), and there must be a legal way for people to get appeal in case of accidental misclassified stuff.
For example, my telco provider has no right to terminate my service unless I'm 90 days behind in payments given the importance of telecommunication, so why should a social network not be subject to the same terms, given the importance of social media to modern society. Final terminations of service must be subject to due legal process.
Fix social media and the "classic" media will follow.