What are Henry David Thoreau's views on correspondence and daily news?

The answer to this question can be found in Henry David Thoreau's Walden. More specifically, a reader should check the chapter titled "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For." The specific set of quotes comes fairly early in the section:

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage . . . And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.

Thoreau doesn't come out and expressly say that reading news and letters is a "waste of time," but it is clear that he believes this to be mostly true. He just says it much more eloquently:

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

The reason that Thoreau feels this way is that he believes that most news isn't new news at all. He says that once he has read a story about a particular topic, he doesn't need to read a similar story about the same kind of thing happening elsewhere.

we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?

Thoreau goes on to explain how international news is no better. He explains how news from England and Spain isn't news at all. He claims that it is just the same information repackaged with different names.
Thoreau feels this way because he believes that people's obsession with the news gossip gets in the way of living deliberately in a person's own immediate reality. He prefers to live his own experiences rather than read about other people's experiences.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails . . . Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.