>the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term

I disagree. I had the same idea for a news site and I'm disappointed they beat me to it. I think it would only take me maybe 30-minutes to and hour to summarize the news of the moment. Do it three times a day. How hard is that? You could easily hire extremely smart people to do this. What English major at a top college wouldn't love to put this on his/her resume for some extra beer money?