With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions.
I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...).
One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden. Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality sources, across the political spectrum.
I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of of bias problems, but still).
Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.
Does an alright job imo
Here's "what happened politically in France in the last month":
The query also seems to be limited to a month. When increasing the query param to 60 or 120 days, nothing changes.
To be sure, sections (such as a homepage) still do get significant number of visits. However, the numbers I speak of differ by an order of magnitude. Articles really are the homepages now, this isn't a blind generalization.
There's a bit of a Heisenberg effect involved here. We know not to spend too much time dressing a section front, but we know we'll be judged for it by you. So we put stuff up there that might be what you think we should think to be significant, or else you'll lose your trust in our judgment.
But by no means does seeing the placement tell you anything about effectiveness of placement.
Seems very arbitrary these days if there is any way to get a curated and prioritized selection at all. Seems more like a continuous stream. Keeping up to date is sisyfos work.
However, consider that social share counts can and often exceed measured view counts. As in, viral articles are not necessarily ever read by people who share them.
In the old days, when news was printed on paper, you would have one front page per day. I have no idea how many front pages there are per day now but probably dozens if not hundreds of variants, where only after some hours the biggest news is no longer the biggest.