I typically look up and read a paper when it's referenced in discussion or cited in something else, I'm reading/watching, and the purported contents seem surprising to me. This normally happens 3 or 4 times a week.

Honestly many papers are written in a way that's hard to approach and difficult to understand unless you're prepared to reread them a few times.

You're better off just getting your science news from actual science communicators and not the raw source.