The press releases and statements that come from police, councils or similar are easy to get but require a human to deal with and edit.
Original reporting and content would be your differentiator and that takes time and effort. What if you are a terrible writer? What if news breaks when you are away or 11 PM and later?
Creating an audience overnight is very hard so there needs to be a runway.
That local audience won't like you writing an inquest report into a local hero who used drugs, or a 'heart of gold' type who killed someone in opaque circumstances. Elections? You are biased! Even if you are not.
100k people should be able to do about 1m pageviews a month on non-rubbish content. Adsense base thats about $1000, but direct sales would be where the revenue is.
News is old almost instantly, you need to keep the ball spinning.
Don't build an aggregator, no one will care.
Do it properly, and don't expect to make money :-)
Good luck!
