a. If something is actually important to me, I will find out about it whether I read the news or not.
b. Keeping in mind (a), any news that I don't hear about through other channels is not urgent.
c. A quick "news" piece will have almost no depth or context that could actually give the story relevance. And will very often just be outright wrong.
My conclusion from these three observations was that I should read news magazines like the new yorker, forbes, etc instead of reading the nytimes. With a goal of trying to find a reasonable mix of biases so that I don't get too closed off to different points of view.
If the story is actually important, yet I didn't hear about it from friends, it won't matter that they spent a month investigating it and writing it up before publishing it.
And strangely, facebook becomes much more useful when thought of as a news aggregator. It will of course have a tendency to produce a bubble, but I certainly found out about Aaron Swartz on facebook far before I saw it anywhere else.