Subscribe to a major daily newspaper on physical paper???
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Few if any conspiracy theories appear in the major national dailies. Sure you can definitely quibble with the Post, NYT or WSJ on many issues but on average and outside of the editorial pages they are very good.
MSM still have some of the problem mentioned by the author ("urgent but unimportant breaking news", "insights about the royal family", "things that are true but irrelevant"). NYT is also prone to writing "stories designed to demean, degrade or intentionally inflict distress with little recourse available" since their style differs from WSJ whose news section are written strictly in reverse pyramid style.
But yeah, reading MSM news without looking at social media discussions of those news can address at least 80% of the problems described by the author. The information explosion is irreversible and the Internet allowed higher parallelism and lower latency in consuming information compared to TV/Radio/Newspapers. Some degree of exhaustion is inevitable unless one trains themself to properly detach and disconnect on the regular.
One of my college profs, back in the day, alleged that all the news worth knowing about would eventually show up in, IIRC, the New York Times Book Review. Not necessarily in a timely fashion, but that's kind of the point: slow news. Seems legit.
I agree, I subscribed to a physical, high-quality Sunday newspaper (I hope this word exists in English, it's a newspaper that gets released once a week on the weekend) and I find it perfect. Frequent enough to stay up-to-date, but slow enough to not get caught up in speculation and clickbait.
It made me realize how basically no "breaking news" is important to my personal life. Reading high-quality reports a few hours once a week is enough to stay more informed than constantly discussing breaking news on Twitter and is far better for my well being.
I've found myself enjoying reading the weekly edition of The Economist digitally. Regular enough to be up-to-date, but slow and small enough that it has details about important events that have happened and very little speculation about developing stories.
You can get it through PressReader[1] and if you're in the UK it's very likely that your local library card will give you free access to it.
No pop up ads, no auto play videos, no cookies, no tracking of any kind.
Few if any conspiracy theories appear in the major national dailies. Sure you can definitely quibble with the Post, NYT or WSJ on many issues but on average and outside of the editorial pages they are very good.