Objective news assessment

News come in all forms and shapes. While most filter them according to content and subjective assessment of interest, why not try and introduce some objective measures of each news item? I propose several relative easy and simple to implement criteria of assessment by which news can be categorized and then filtered or segmented.

The first is the number of people it reports on. While this seems like a crude measure of importance, a news item related to one person that got rehabilitated (no matter who that person is) objectively is less important than famine influencing several million people. By tagging each news item on the number of people reported on (or a rough estimate thereof), one can slice news to people-importance.

The second is monetary. The cost of the item reported, either in tax-payer money or cost of reconstruction, cost of change, influence on GDP, etc. This gives a rough estimate on the financial effect of the news item. Mind you that not only financial news should be assessed by this measure, but rather every news item. Thus every natural disaster or car accident, every joyous event or festival should be tagged with a monetary measure, such that the influence of the reported item on finance can be immediately filtered.

The third is the political hierarchical level of the news item. By this I mean how up does the news item reach? Obviously, presidential reports are pretty way up, but senators, mayors and even local news can be rated according to objective measures of hierarchy, e.g. how many people between the reported people involved  and the president. This way one can assess the political influence the news item has.

One can introduce other important objective measures of news items, e.g. technological measures, social measures etc. This way, one can filter, select, evaluate and relate to news items not only based on content, but actual measures of influence. This way news media can be assessed on the importance of their items. Obviously, this is not intended to replace the content filters but rather augment them. It would be nice to see how much prime-time news are actually about important things.