This could be solved by allowing the player to choice to only get news about certain empires. Say there are a couple of factions that you concerned about and only want to get news from them. Then the game should allow that. Problem solved.
Well, yes. That's why I said as much in the post you quoted. But even then, you need to avoid frequent repetition, and to draw a line between what a player will want to know about, and what he won''t give a toss about. Otherwise you flood him with useless information and trying to sift out the useful bits becomes a chore.
As I say, Stardrive managed to make hearing about important stuff like other empires going to war boring and repetitious, despite modelling it's own 'news reel' approach on the highly effective MOO2 Galnet events. And I don't know of anyone who really read the newspapers in Victoria 2 more than a couple of times before basically ignoring them forever after. It's really hard to get it right, because everyone has their own subjective opinion of what is important, which empires that they want to know about changes throughout the game, and how often they want to be updated before it becomes an irritating formality - and the last one tends to change depending on how busy the player is anyway. I don't mind hearing about stuff early on, when I don't have much to do, but if I'm in the middle of executing a military campaign the last thing I want is the pacing of the game ruined by frequent interruptions to hear about stuff that isn't relevant to the matter at hand.
If they do it right, then it's a great addition to the game; it's immersive and it serves a genuine need. But it's done wrong, then it's at best ignored and at worst really detrimental to the game.
