Why do you come to HN? Not Slashdot? The rules are simple at HN, it isn't particularly curated. The fonts and presentation is a tad 1990's. But, more people visit HN than Slashdot (I liked Slashdot a decade ago).

Think again. Go back to the bean counters in head office with some outrageous idea, a 'Pinterest' type of thing for news...

Imagine a newspaper with a non-curated homepage. Effectively the homepage was an open ended search query. In that query you could retrieve stories and present them simple blog style, last in, first at the top. However, in that search query there would be different weightings. So category would be one weighting, region would be another, favourite writer would be another and so on.

Then, for new user, they would get default weightings with their GeoIP bearing on the region, so, if Welsh, stories relating to Wales would get given prominence by that weighting factor.

As new reader reads stuff the weightings get learned. If they like celebrity nonsense then the category weighting for that goes up. Equally if they like city news, stocks and all that stuff, then the weighting for business stories goes up, just by their act of reading what they like to read.

In this weighting, all the stories would be in their feed, however, things with a lower weighting would be further down the page, for that reader they would be 'released' later. So, the top of the page would be what they are interested in based on what they read, further down the page there would be less important stuff to them. Miles down the page it would effectively be a core dump of all the major news wires.

Imagine some story comes out about some Z list celebrity getting a new car. For most people that would not feature on the homepage, but, for someone into Z list celebrities it would.

Come back six hours later, scroll miles down that page and the story would be there, for all to see and read if they could be bothered with the mile long scroll. The story would effectively be deferred but not for the person that likes such stuff.

For the city guy, that story about shares in GSK going up one penny might make it to the top. Everyone else gets it deferred but still timeline accurate.

In this system there might be no need whatsoever to categorise stories explicitly. Or to decide what their placement is. There might not be a need for any content management system at all. Content management could be crowd sourced, with people 'pinning' stories to boards where those boards are ad-hoc de-facto 'categories'. This 'pinning' process might not be explicit, it could be learned from search. If someone searches for the Z-list celebrity and then goes on from that story to read about cars then that story is potentially also a 'car' category story too.

Imagine if you liked some news worthy person, e.g. Cliff Richard. You could have some 'like button'/'pin' that you tag to the name so you are able to guarantee that 'Cliff Richard' always makes it to your feed, even if the story is just him doing up his shoelaces.

You can also watch if someone actually reads a story. You can time how long they have the story open for, you know their reading speed. You know everyone else's reading speed. You know where the content has failed, as in, at what point they got bored of reading it and mouse/scroll activity stopped.

I don't know if you have ever noticed, but Google don't categorise search results. The portals and web directories that pre-dated Google did do such things. Now just imagine, with the rich content of news, if you completely got rid of the filing stuff in categories thing and just made it all work off search. By default the search results would be everything that ever happened, weighted by region, writer and a myriad of other categories. For a given reader they or you might not even know what those categories were, they could be devised ad hoc, based on browsing history and explicit likes/pins. Everyone would always have a different homepage, furthermore, there would just be that one homepage. Stories could be presented in pop-ups so you didn't have to hit the back button.

Tying it into an ad platform could be fun. This could break away from the tedium of today's pages where there are twenty or so bugs on the page, doing whatever. It could be put server side. You could sell ads to people based on what their guestimated search rating was, so, rather than show people the ad from that shop they visited two weeks ago, show them some shop they are going to visit next. The ad model is flawed, ads are shown for that posh camera you bought after you bought it, not before. Or after you decided you by a new TV instead. They don't do a good job of creating demand. Run fewer ads, tie them to affiliate schemes as per normal but deliver new leads rather than re-treads. Again, do what Google do, but more focused on the opportunities present in news, leverage search and deliver the ads.

Your point regarding editors - nobody knows who editors are these days. In the 1980's everyone knew who they all were, they were household names.

You are obviously technically able, therefore, if you want to re-do how news is done, pick up the solr search engine, create your own indexes and feed them into the search with adjustable weightings. Those indexes, experiment with them and see what you get out with a 'search for nothing' and what you get out searching more generally. Instead of an explicit 'politics' category, the 'politics' tab could be just a keyword, the search goes off and does the rest. See if you can get the search to learn, ideally to get to a point where the results are far better than today's curated newspapers yet you have absolutely no idea how it works. Bring some Skynet awareness to it just by giving it lots to search and weight stories by. It doesn't have to be much more sophisticated than the 'Pinterest' home page and they managed something...

Your bean counters are in for the long haul. They know the writing is on the wall with where they are going and that news has to be redone, somehow. Someone at some news company has to step outside the way things have been done and come back with some new ideas borrowed from how search has worked for the mainstream internets.