To me this is solved for a lot of domains. The economist (and prob some other weekly’s) do a good job for general news, and I’m sure some newsletters do the job for other domains.

The key is finding slow news for the niche you care about.

Personally I think that a big gap is local news. Would love a site like wickedlocal but where I get things weekly and have no ads or superfluous stories. I’d pay for it.

I’m experimenting with some automated scraping of news sources (Twitter, Reddit, town websites, stores, restaurants, etc) for my town. Hoping to be able to get it do a point where I can produce something of value on 1hr a week.