In The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (1965) their attempts to computerise the news include ranking disasters by number killed divided by distance away. This is pretty much how the news works (though you might include colour of skin).

There seems to be still an idea that news should be presented in newspaper form. That is, there are "important" stories which warrant pushing to the top. If you want to know what stories are important, I think the trick will be to allow each subscriber to feed that back. Not by algorithms ( please!) but in some way which no other organisation has managed to get right. Over to you.