It'd be great if there was an entire network of these kinds of services, so as to skim what's going on in any field. I've long been interested in summaries + news curation and worked for many years doing just that but I've also had some tiny personal projects (years ago) where I tried doing something similar to Ancient Beat but on niche topics.

Another thought: There could also be a differentiation between news article curation and research curation, though I understand they'd intersect at times. Often, looking at the research as it's published gives you good lead time on any news articles that will be published about said research, though it requires a lot of reading.

In the professional news curation I did, a "lead time" approach I used for the industry we dealt with was to locate and skim non-English news and publish summaries on what's happening worldwide, which put us ahead of the pack (ie, English-language news sites picking it up) by at least a few days, if not a week.