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.
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.