I don’t know that this quote from evan’s LiveJournal (“Link Pool“) formulates the matter real well, but I think he’s approaching that and a subset of solutions as well:
“So the growing problem with personal news sites (aka “weblogs”, but also including sites like slashdot or metafilter) is that there are so many of them you can’t read them all. In fact, the growing phenomenon is that many people don’t report the news at all, and instead select a subset of the news found elsewhere and link to it.”