>the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term
I disagree. I had the same idea for a news site and I'm disappointed they beat me to it. I think it would only take me maybe 30-minutes to and hour to summarize the news of the moment. Do it three times a day. How hard is that? You could easily hire extremely smart people to do this. What English major at a top college wouldn't love to put this on his/her resume for some extra beer money?
It is in fact pretty hard :) We are working on content summarization too, with a Chrome extension that lets you read a human written summary of Hacker News frontpage links. Writing the summaries and making sure you're up to date takes time. You need to make sure you stick to the author's point of view, that you really understand the article in depth and groked the key points. Of course it depends on the article you summarize but I can spend a good 30 minutes on one article by Paul Graham or Mark Suster.
The volume of news can be daunting. 30 mins to an hour depending on a person's speed might not be that much. Tech news alone can blow past this time frame easily, especially if you want to be relevant, comprehensive, and interesting enough to capture a decent chunk of posts.
That said, I know first hand most people are incapable of writing well much less condense into exact words. This was on my list of to do as well and I've interviewed some writers and those of relevant majors and I assure you, the stuff that comes back is not as good as you think it would be. In the long run, you'd need an army of decent writers that can condense content well.
it's already showing some quite old news as a result. the new jersey earthquake was several weeks ago, positioned as the third "world news" story.
great concept and design, though.