I think I'm going to take some design queues from you and simplify my system. Word clouds are cool but too intensive on the $5 server I pay for.
When loading the front page, you're loading a 1-minute-cached HTML page of it that was constructed out of headlines already in my PostgreSQL database that were put there by the ingestion goroutine.
I like the idea of word clouds actually, I think you're on to something there. I think you just need to pre-generate them rather than doing it adhoc (if that's what you're doing here) for speed. Additionally, perhaps consider using sentiment in a way that orients stories based on positive and negative sentiment. Right now I am not seeing how I as a visitor/user can act on the sentiment analysis as it is presented now.
It would be neat to see a collection of uplifting stories grouped together through the sentiment analysis.
Anyway, food for thought. I hope you keep hacking away on it as it's just good fun to build things.