The trouble is your first and second categories conflict. If someone is about to be appointed to some office the citizenry may want to weigh in on it. If a disaster occurs then people may want to donate money or volunteer to help victims. A product review of a product not yet released can inform the decision of whether to buy an existing product or wait for the new release.
The actual problem is with 24 hour formats reporting things they don't actually know. Which happens because there is an ongoing story with ~15 minutes a day of new information, but just repeating those 15 minutes of information all day will cause you to lose viewers who leave the news on all day and don't want to hear the same thing over and over whereas reporting other stories for the rest of the day will cause you to lose viewers who tune in at random times looking for specifically that information. So they try to report "new" information about the most popular story all day even when they don't have any.
There is a fairly obvious solution to this, which is to discontinue broadcast reporting and provide news on demand. If you want to know the latest on the lost plane, here it is; that story will stick at the top of the page until people stop clicking on it but nothing new will be posted until something new is actually known.
Then let people create custom news streams like channels on streaming music sites: If some news happens with the missing plane then make that the next story in my stream, otherwise give me news about NSA surveillance, then protests occurring locally, then tech product reviews, etc.
The actual problem is with 24 hour formats reporting things they don't actually know. Which happens because there is an ongoing story with ~15 minutes a day of new information, but just repeating those 15 minutes of information all day will cause you to lose viewers who leave the news on all day and don't want to hear the same thing over and over whereas reporting other stories for the rest of the day will cause you to lose viewers who tune in at random times looking for specifically that information. So they try to report "new" information about the most popular story all day even when they don't have any.
There is a fairly obvious solution to this, which is to discontinue broadcast reporting and provide news on demand. If you want to know the latest on the lost plane, here it is; that story will stick at the top of the page until people stop clicking on it but nothing new will be posted until something new is actually known.
Then let people create custom news streams like channels on streaming music sites: If some news happens with the missing plane then make that the next story in my stream, otherwise give me news about NSA surveillance, then protests occurring locally, then tech product reviews, etc.