What do you use to check news every day?
An older example: if you didn't pay attention to the news on 9/11 you risked being stuck in the airport for a very long time.
So yeah, there are situations where you do need to follow the news. Not often, but two global events have happened in my lifetime (3 if you count the fall of the Berlin wall) where you really did need to pay attention to the news.
Maybe some sort of exponential back-of is warrented? Say you check the news and if nothing relevant happend you check in again the next day, then you skip a day, then two, etc. When an event happens where you need to follow the news (say a local flood), you go back to an hourly checkup.
The final thing I have noticed is that the news you need to follow are mostly very local. What happens in other countries is, relatively speaking, of no importance to you.
I assure you, you still hear about the big events without issue. Just your usual day-to-day is more than enough to hear about the important news very quickly. There's no way you could have missed 9/11 or the Covid lockdowns. I mean, I don't care a bit about soccer and I still heard within hours when my country was eliminated from the Euro.
And whenever something particular sounds like it deserves your attention you can go read about it on whatever news website. But that's fairly rare.
Check your government website if you want to know what the regulations are today, or check your airport and airline sites before you leave for the airport if you're worried about delays. You don't need "news" for this.
I don't think you need to over complicate it. There's nothing wrong with checking the news daily if that's what you like, or following some particular stories or events important to you even more regularly. A compulsion to keep checking, spending hours a day on it, or some fear that you need to check or you'll miss out is where it could negatively affect your life.
I needed them to keep taps on the government and explain the ever changing rules in a better, more clear way. It is not important for the government to make the rules simple, understandable or appreciable so they didn't.
That is not overclomplicating it, btw. That is responding to reality.
And by over complicating it, I'm talking about this exponential backoff algorithm. You can read the news if you want, don't feel bad about it. Nothing bad is going to happen and you won't miss out on much if you don't though. And I promise you you would spend more time scouring the news for 9/11 type events than you would spend stuck in airports due to said events because you didn't read the news.
I've done the same exact thing.
I find very little usefulness in the national and international posturing, blaming, and virtue signaling that makes up most broadcast, cable, and print news.
Reflecting for myself, I used to feel the same way, but quit news about 6 months ago and have never felt happier. No longer am I sinking valuable hours into something that didn't bring me happiness or help me better myself.
That's even more true when the news takes the form of something like Twitter.
If you enjoy it, keep it up, but don't think it somehow capital-M Matters.
One of the nice things about Biden's presidency is how much less attention the news seems to merit, these days.
Meanwhile, did you find any of the Trump-related news for those four years (hell, over five, really, counting the election) particularly actionable, in an "I really needed to know that right this minute" sort of way? I kept up with all of it (it was entertaining, for sure) but never did, personally. Even CDC guidance and such during the pandemic filtered down to state and local ordinances by the time they mattered much. Mask mandates quickly resulted in posters at store entrances, and most provided free or cheap masks, especially at first, so there was little likelihood of being caught out there. I anticipated panic-shortages before the news caught on when I saw a way-above-normal number of household paper products in shopping carts at the local bulk store-by the time it was in the news or became a meme a few days later, the shortages were already a problem. Some help that would have been—and realistically, we'd have probably been OK if we'd been affected by them, we'd have figured something out with only very little inconvenience. Regardless, even a news-avoider would have realized that they should maybe pop in slightly more often than usual to see what's up, specifically, with the whole pandemic thing, well before it had much effect in the US.
Most big stories still don't actually matter. Pulse nightclub shooting, or the one in Vegas, or the Boston Marathon bombers? Quick news mattered—locally. Living several states away, I could have found out a month later and it'd have made no difference. Assange extradited, US pulling out of Afghanistan—US invading Afghanistan, for that matter? Russia invades Ukraine? Brexit? Libyan revolution? "Immigrant caravans"? I care because I'm a bit of a politics and news junkie, but if I'd ignored those the harm to my life would have been zero. They're not local events, for me, and they're just not that important to my day-to-day life. I could have found out about Brexit a year after the vote, would have made no difference (there's a joke in there about how long that process has taken).
9/11 disrupted air travel and phone service nationwide, but was of the rare "you could hardly miss it" variety so one was unlikely to encounter those problems before becoming aware of it.
I'm actually having trouble thinking of another event in the last 30+ years, in the US, that wasn't local and that had a "light cone", if you will, of actual effects on my life that hit in less than a week, and for which foreknowledge was in any way actionable. Typically, they never "hit". If they do, then finding out when that happens is just as good.