I stopped reading political news 2.5 years ago, and haven't looked back since. I now view news as an addiction, similar to fast food, alcohol or gambling. I occasionally consume a bit of political news here and there, and it always leaves a bad taste in my "mental mouth", almost physically, as if I've eaten something too big and sugary to be healthy.

(This is despite the fact that I live in Russia, a country in which news seemingly have higher survival value than in developed countries. Plus, I live in a region bordering eastern Ukraine, which now flickers between a failed gangster state and an active war zone -- and I have relatives living there, right on the front line between the Ukrainian army and the rebels! Instead of reading the news, I just call them and check up on them directly.)

My strategy for getting important news is:

• Have friends and talk to them occasionally.
• Have relatives and talk to them occasionally.
• Have coworkers and talk to them occasionally.
• Ride in taxicabs and talk to the drivers occasionally.

Or, if you are not a social person:

• Don't be a hikikomori and go out occasionally.
• Browse the Internet occasionally.

If there's a high-impact event happening around you, you just won't miss it, even you don't talk to anyone. You'll overhear people talking about the event, you'll see threads with huge karma on the front pages of Hacker News and Reddit, you'll have your aunt calling you about that. I don't think you'd be able to miss 9/11 or Katrina during the days they were happening.

Edit: I just noticed that my strategy for getting meaningful news boils down to this:

• Talk to people, or
• Observe people talking.

This applies to any news domain: general news, professional news etc. Personally, I think it is safe to disengage from general-life communities (e.g. Facebook) but not from professional communities (e.g. Hacker News, CGTalk etc.). This way you'd get ultra-high-impact general news, and all high-impact professional news. If you're in science, I don't think that you had any chance of not seeing CRISPR on the front page of your community. If you're in tech, you certainly couldn't miss the Snowden story. And you wouldn't miss 9/11 in both these communities.

Edit2: Here's an even simpler strategy:

• Be available to people.

If a news item is of any importance, it will hit you from multiple directions. My personal recent example is the european refugee problem. I heard about it from three separate sources: Reddit, a friend in Germany and a local friend addicted to news.