What I will be amazed is a good automatic summarization algorithm that is using abstraction and not just extraction.
Also, check out circa (http://cir.ca/). Never tried, but as I read, it uses both human and algorithm to "summarize" articles.
Further, many of the news really originate from relatively limited sources (reuters, etc), so you can plug your solution there as well.
Therefore it should be OK to assume that if you put humans at the same pipeline to summarize news manually, the capacity and efficiency will be reasonable.
Where this doesn't apply, and where I do think you're completely right is non-news articles: think blogs, tweets (although there's not much to summarize in 140chars), product descriptions, scientific articles, etc. These things are produced in much more volume and much less workflow around them.