[al1x]

Why not scrape Alexa's list of the top 500? -- http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/News As a side note, not to ruin your party or anything, but over the years a handful of HN users have made news aggregators as side projects and none of them have really gone anywhere. You might want to think about putting your effort into something else. Google News is a pretty sweet product.

[ScottWhigham]

Alexa's list is a good idea. You'd still need to curate considerable though - that would be the only issue. For example, Shutterstock is listed as the #16 news site on Alexa.

[kevinfat]

Do any of them have details of how they built their news aggregator? For example, what infrastructure did they use to crawl, parse, and index the pages, etc.