You’d be better off actually reading one quality news feed, than in marking as read dozens without reading them. And for “real” news, there is basically no reason to read multiple sites.

If other people want to be filters, I say let them. If there’s a good article in the New Republic or the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts & Letters daily will link to it. So I don’t need to read those feeds directly. Most memes and so forth will eventually make it to Kottke or BB. Ars Technica covers the entire tech industry pretty well, from policy to hardware.