I searched for a good news filter that would inform me about the world in ways that I found to be useful and beneficial, and came up with nothing.

Any source that contained news items I categorized as useful, they made up less than 5% of the information presented by that source, and thus were drowned out and took too much time and effort, on a daily basis, to find. Thus, I mostly ignore news, except what I get indirectly through following particular communities like LessWrong or Slashdot.

However, I perform this exercise on a regular basis (perhaps once a year), clearing out feeds that have become too junk-filled, searching out new feeds, and re-evaluating feeds I did not accept last time, to refine my information access.

I find that this habit of perpetual long-term change (significant reorganization, from first principles of the involved topic or action) is highly beneficial in many aspects of my life.

ETA: My feed reader contains the following:

• Accelerating Future - futurism
• Alcor News - cryonics
• Ars Technica - tech industry
• Get Rich Slowly - personal finances
• IEET - futurism (currently considering dropping, as it contains quite a bit of ill-thought politics)
• io9 - science fiction, comic books, etc. (very high volume, sometimes NSFW)
• LessWrong - rational thinking
• Lifehacker - personal productivity
• Marginal Revolution - economics and well-thought politics
• Overcoming Bias - thought... stuff... (only recently added back after LW split when I noticed Nick Bostrom was contributing, still evaluating)
• Sentient Developments - futurism
• Singularity Institute - SIAI news
• Slashdot - tech industry and various topics
• WoW.com - World of Warcraft
• two feeds related to my job.

For the vast majority of posts on each of these feeds, I only read the headline. Feeds where I consistently (>25%) read the articles or comments are: Slashdot (mostly while bored at work), Marginal Revolution (the only place I read every post), Sentient Developments, Accelerating Future, and LessWrong. Even for those, I rarely (<10%) read linked articles, preferring instead to read only the distillation by the blog author, or the comments by other users.

ETA2: I also listen to NPR during my short commute to and from work, and occasionally watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report online, for entertainment. Firefox with NoScript and Adblock Plus makes it bearable - I'm extremely advertising averse.

I do not own a television, and generally consider TV news (in the US) to be horrendous and mind-destroying.

Good question, which I'm finding surprisingly hard to answer. (i.e. I've spent more time composing this comment than is perhaps reasonable, struggling through several false starts).

Here are some strategies/behaviours I use: expand and winnow; scorched earth; independent confirmation; obsession.

• "expand and winnow": after finding an information source I really like (using the term "source" loosely, a blog, a forum, a site, etc.) I will often explore the surrounding "area", subscribe to related blogs or sources recommended by that source. In a second phase I will sort through which of these are worth following and which I should drop to reduce overload
• "scorched earth": when I feel like I've learned enough about a topic, or that I'm truly overloaded, I will simply drop (almost) every subscription I have related to that topic, maybe keeping a major source to just monitor (skim titles and very occasionally read an item)
• "independent confirmation": I do like to make sure I have a diversified set of sources of information, and see if there are any items (books, articles, movies) which come at me from more than one direction, especially if they are not "massively popular" items, e.g. I'd discard a recommendation to see Avatar, but I decided to dive into Jaynes when it was recommended on LW and my dad turned out to have liked it enough to have a hard copy of the PDF
• "obsession": there typically is one thing I'm obsessed with (often the target of an expand and winnow operation); e.g. at various points in my life I've been obsessed with Agora Nomic, XML, Java VM implementation, Agile, personal development, Go, and currently whatever LW is about. An "obsessed" topic can be but isn't necessarily a professional interest, but it's what dominates my other curiosity and tends to color my other interests. For instance while obsessed with Go I pursued the topic both for its own sake and as a source of metaphors for understanding, say, project management or software development. I generally quit ("scorched earth") once I become aware I'm no longer learning anything, which often coincides with the start of a new obsession.

My RSS feeds folder, once massive, is down to a half dozen indispensable blogs. I've unsubscribed from most of the mailing lists I used to read. My main "monitored" channel is Twitter, where I follow a few dozen folks who've turned up gold in the past. My main "active" source of new juicy stuff to think about is LW.

(ETA: as an example of "independent confirmation" in the past two minutes, one of my Agile colleagues on Twitter posted this link.)

yeah, news is usually a time/attention sink, I go to my bookmarked blogs etc whenever I feel like procrastinating.

15-20 minutes of looking at the main news sites/blogs should be enough to tell you what the biggest developments are, but really, I read them for entertainment value as much as for anything else.

as a side note, antiwar is good site for world news.