Are you thinking something along the lines of http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ with better recommendations and perhaps some way of following stories as the unfold?

I agree that news consumption is broken and there are lots of opportunities for new entrants, but I'm not sure what the "right way" is - I, for one, spend way too much time sifting through news, blogs, tweets, FB updates etc etc and probably still miss a lot of interesting stuff while reading stuff I don't really care about.

- Gummi