I find that the best way to combat this is to be very discriminative about what reads. I only try to read high-quality content on a daily basis. I try to avoid subscribing to any "high volume" feeds (such as more traditional news outlets that have multiple new items per day). Lately, I have also been eliminating a lot of the feeds that I don't think are up to snuff.

This means that at most I will get a handful of new item to be read each day, but each item that I read is likely to be sufficiently intellectually stimulating. It also means that there is no temptation to continually check my feedreader because I'm aware of the fact that there will likely not be any new items available to me.

I think that Philip G's assertion that keeping up on the news on a daily basis in effect makes one "stupider" is an interesting one. I know that for a while I was trying to get into the habit of picking up a newspaper every Sunday and reading it "cover to cover" on the premise that I should be more aware of my surroundings. I have fallen out of the habit lately and had been somewhat berating myself for it, but perhaps my unconscious was just trying to tell me something.

What new things did I learn week to week? George Bush said such and such stupid thing. John Kerry said such and such unprofound thing. More people died in Iraq. North Carolina is losing jobs.

I find that anyone who does not completely live in a cave will ultimately learn any important news simply as a product of their environment - either by hearing it from other people or some other way. I first heard about the Sept 11th attacks by word of mouth - not by watching CNN.

Usually late-breaking news is so speculative anyway, and one has to sift through so much kruft on the off chance of tripping over something mildly important. It's usually more efficient to wait until the news has more time to be digested and filters down to the higher quality channels anyway.