Think of it like a sports game. If it's ongoing it sucks you in. If it's over, you hear the score and maybe a couple of stats, and you've sucked everything important. Watching the game might take a couple of hours but the recap might take 30 seconds. For sports there's benefit from watching the game, but for news you want the recap, not the game. You want to get your news from people selling you recaps rather than a play-by-play.
What you want is a good newsweekly. Most of the good ones are dead. The Economist is still going. They're biased but wear their biases proud and up front rather than pretending to be neutral like most everybody else does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events is another great option. Blendle's daily email is one. Several others have been posted to HN from time to time.