>Would you as a reader pay more for "summarization and synthesis"? Probably not, Wikipedia and Google already do this really well.
Actually they don't. Wikipedia's long article format is very poor at creating a news archive that can be filtered, sorted and searched like a database. OTOH, Google has a lot of tools for searching, sorting and filtering, but they can only do those actions on existing articles, which are part of the problem. Simply curating existing articles doesn't create a news database. You end up with Google news which has 2000 versions of the same news. To make a news database work, the articles themselves have to be in a format that can work in a database (shorter, fact based etc).