Not OP but I use podcasts, books and following intelligent people (not from the media) on twitter.

Also genuine question, why do you need to be informed about the world?

Sometimes it directly affects you. You benefit from being informed about stuff occurring near you, in your country, likely about the largest trade partners of your country. Possibly you're not very interested in what happens in Botswana or Peru, and Western media cover these places scarcely. But maybe news about China are important for you in most of the world, or news about Russia are important for you if you're in Europe and depend on Russian gas, and generally don't like warfare near you. Etc.

It affecting me doesn't mean I need to know why. If a serious earthquake happens it also affects me a lot and there's no way to get news about it in advance. The only reason you feel like you have to follow the news is because you can, but at the cost of what?

I have several examples of major world events I didn't know about for many weeks or months until it came up in conversation and I've never felt it affected me in a negative way, meanwhile I get time for long walks with my dog.

Earthquakes are one of the few disasters that strike with absolutely no warning.

And that's why I used that example. The others you can kinda predict from following news. If I used another example the argument would make no sense.

For a recentish example, my family had a decent amount of toilet paper stocked up before panic buying due to covid led to it running out. I would have had to pay a significant premium for TP if I hadn't stayed informed.

Most "news" is actually just low-quality analysis of things that don't matter to you very much.

The only news/analysis I recommend is https://geopoliticalfutures.com/

Diffusion. If something is important enough, I will hear about it from people in real life, such as natural disasters, the weather, important global events, and so on. Rarely do I ever look at or read the news directly, it's simply a waste of time.

I try my best to NOT stay informed. Like a sibling mentioned: stuff that's big enough tends to creep through one way or another.

I am however on top on rather arcane topics that I am very interested in. Twitter curation works wonders for that.

For me it's essentially being my own journalist. I cringe writing that, as 'being my own journalist' is basically what every extreme-wing lunatic says in just about every conspiracy group. But of course I like to think I'm different.

That means that whenever I want to form an opinion on something I try to seek out information to construct my own arguments, based on premises, based on facts, to eventually get to conclusions.

That limits the range of topics I can draw reasonable conclusions on given I have limited time. The result is that on most topics I don't actually hold any firm stances because I simply don't know, despite knowing quite a few facts about said topics. And I'm okay with that, I'd rather be not sure than to be wrong, and outside of some political or health or work decisions I have to make every now and then, it's not really necessary to have to draw a correct conclusion all the time.

For example I really don't need to predict with a great degree of certainty whether Tumblr or Twitter is going to succeed or not over the next 12 months, and for what reasons. It's interesting to follow the facts, but concluding a trajectory from that is not necessary.

And I find that 'the news' is still pretty good at reporting facts. Not so great at drawing conclusions from them, always. But just getting facts is fine for me on a whole range of topics. Then I pick the few topics that I want to really draw conclusions on, and research it myself. (which usually involves seeking out prior research by others btw, in a non-news setting, often academic).