I think the repetition and the talking heads don't have to be a bad thing, it's just that the news outlets mix their presentation styles.

Business/Sports have already been broken out into their own channels by most outlets, due to different viewer demographics, which is also nice because they have very different presentation styles. News outlets also need to figure out what they're doing on their main channel, or break it up further.

* Are they delivering summaries of today's important events around the world like a nightly news program? If so most viewers will watch for one cycle, and you can deliver them a high quality, well produced report.

* Are they focusing on a 'live' breaking news event? If so maybe they should just be silent and listen to the police scanners, with occasional narration. Every 15 mins you could give an update "this is what we know so far" for people just tuning in.

* Are they doing the whole talking-head thing where experts/politicians are being interviewed and debates are happening? If so you could have 30-60 minutes per topic for today's news.

IMHO, all of these are best suited with different presentation styles... news presenter vs narrator vs debate moderator. Unfortunately they're trying to do all three, which just doesn't work.

The difference is, 24 hours news media covers news 24 hours a day. There's a lot of that time when there really just is no news to speak of. Social media might cover an event in real time with people glued to the screen, but we only see this type of occurrence when there's actually a significant event going on. This story might be covered by social news for days or hours, but when it's done everyone shuts it off and goes on with their lives until the next story. Meanwhile the 24 hour news media continues rolling, irrelevant as always.

Real time news isn't bad. Real time, 24 hour "news" is bad. That's how you get manufactured news stories, or media outlets creating/becoming the news.