It will be interesting to see how much better this will be than a custom installation of Wordpress with the proper plugins to achieve the same functionality.
That focus is what's sets us apart from many of the other open-source offerings out there, in my opinion.
Maybe it would be more fruitful to invest that $975,000 in improving Drupal and/or creating a installation profile for newsrooms?
Not to mention a 2-1/2 year head start on understanding and actually delivering on user needs.
And a vastly larger developer base than this project will ever dream of having.
It drives me friggin nuts when people declare the need to build new customized WAFs and CMSs to meet their highly unique needs.
If OpenPublish doesn't meet your your needs, you can customize it for a lot less than $1M.
Edit: Here's a good white paper from MediaCurrent
http://www.mediacurrent.com/guide-large-scale-publishing-dru...
And the distribution site: