I appreciate the feedback and the connection! Clearly, the content creation models are quite different; our focus is pretty exclusively on hard news (for now); we summarize (and can rearrange) individual facts from many sources instead of making one narrative per story written by one person; and you don't rank the news in any meaningful way, as far as I can tell (do correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how).

We've got quite a few very motivated writers who find writing bitts to be fun, and they know they're working on a site that will be open content (complete with API) and thus a potentially forkable public resource. We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community. We haven't even hard-launched (the content is still behind a login), we have had minimal publicity, and yet we've got enough regular participants to have a decent evening edition. Relying exclusively on paid writers will prove a drain on resources and might pose a significant roadblock to allowing the site to scale. It's a good thing we didn't do that with Wikipedia...