E.G. not living in the states, half of the "top news" section is pretty irrelevant to me and the relevancy of the others seems to be based on the personal interests of the tech sawy contributors. I'm sure this gets better once more people are using it. But i guess having some noise is unavoidable.
The nice thing about this crowd approach might or might not be, that only provable facts are quoted and fewer false accusations are made. Thats mostly the reason why I stopped following news after the Utøya massacre in 2011 and later quitted my job at a news site.
Is there already an API one can fiddle around with? I think there is a huge potential in being able to use that data and hopefully feed stuff back. In my opinion, the problem with journalism today is not journalism itself but the distribution of content and the lack of choice how to consume it.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rol...