So our readers need to do a better job of helping us figure out which stories are relevant/interesting to us, give us ways to skim and summarize without reading the whole article, filter out "dupes", etc.
Which right now works best for me. If I use Google Reader directly, it's set up to use the re-reader style, at home I use NetNewsWire with the subscription list hidden. So to browse through it, I can mostly use keyboard shortcuts, so skipping something is easy. Reading is comfortable enough, but if the article is too long, I either open it in a background browser window or send it to Instapaper.
Works well enough for me, although if I had more newspaper-style story listings in there, that just contain the headlines and link to the main story, filtering and adding to the queue might be more difficult.
And alternative would be some kind of social filtering, but that's close enough to HN or Reddit or just listing the links you've got on your twitter inline (c.f. http://news.peepcode.com/)
http://www.postrank.com/main - their index page is baffling.