The Economist does include a one page summary of the week's news near the start, with just one or two sentences for each story. You can use that to decide which you wish to read a whole article about later in the paper. You can even choose not to read any, though admittedly it would be a bit expensive to buy the paper and read only one page of it. (There is also a page about business news, reflecting the publication's title, and it's often worth looking at the first couple of those.)

Also worth looking at unconditionally are the letters page, which is always very good and sometimes has very famous correspondents (occasionally from tyrannical regimes making preposterous statements, with no response from the paper), and the obituary, which has an eclectic selection of very famous and very unknown individuals.

I think of something similar but less "news" lead - for example a backlog of the most "important" global issues (yes we can out climate change at number one) but it's things like "water shortages in southern sudan" at number 18 and so on that really will give perspective - when we see things like Brexit at number 67 that we know we have a proper balance.

I would start with a metric like "estimated number of excess human deaths from this issue in next year, five years fifty years" and have open transparent ways to assess the metric

How do you apply discrete metrics to topics that people value differently?

the same way newspaper editors do - they apply a set of curated values - and people buy the set of values they think matches theirs most closely.

at least this way we are transparently surfacing the issues and there is ability for people to apply different curation criteria

Basically I would love to get the weekly report from the US national security advisor - that's basically what I think Inam trying to create.

NYT and WaPo have weekly (daily too) newsletters that you can just have a rule move to a folder and check once a month.