Just found a recent summary of Richard Skentra in which he reports about the new competive arena for Topix:

"I count at least 15 news startups trying to tag, aggregate or
community-edit the news. And the VC funds sure are flowing. Topix had
funding offers back in 2004 when we started but about half of the vc's
we talked to were just starting to take an interest in the web again,
and some of them hadn't thought much about news as an interesting
space. That's obviously changed since there's at least $30M in funding
here and we don't have details about everyone.

Newsvine: $5M
TailRank
Gather.com: $9M, 23 employees
Memeorandum: ? Hints Gabe may have taken some funding
Digg: 2.8M
Findory
Associated Content: $5.4M
Jeff Jarvis/Upendra Shardanand/Craig Newmark news startup
Backfence: $3M
Pegasus News
Tinfinger
Inform: 55 employees(!)
Bayosphere (dead?)
and of course for completeness topix.net

I haven't counted stuff like Attensa getting $9M or
Pajamas Media or blog search like Technorati/Feedster which is in a
related space but not focused specifically on news.p>When we started we were pretty much alone working on applying
technology to news, there was Google News and MSN Newsbot but no
startup activity, now the space is really humming. All of this activity
makes it much more exciting to work in the space although if Steve
Rubel is right and there is a coming Web 2.0 crashit could be ugly. Or maybe it looks like the social software space of a
few years back, when there was a lot of press about
Friendster/Linkedin/Ryze/Spoke/Zerodegrees/etc. but some unknown
upstart MySpace ran away with the prize in the end.

Not included above but worthy of watch are efforts by the
existing news industry to build out new cool stuff on their own sites.
A lot of web2.0 startups are using fancy open source tech but there are
bright creative (and often idealistic) folks at mainstream places
applying this stuff too. These folks are using technology not for
tech's sake but simply as tools to enhance the journalistic mission to
inform and educate the public and shine lights in dark places (if
you're snickering you have no business being in the news startup space
btw)."

Finding the right news is happening more and more online with guidance of the 'Wisdom of Crowds'. It will take a little longer to bring these portals mainstream but their time will come...