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.
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...