True, but my point is people are already doing it at the start of the pipeline. Think what happens when Reuters decide to make a SaaS offering of their summarized content. Even regardless of that, you can hire a battery of professional summarizers instead of PHDs and do it pretty well.

Where this doesn't apply, and where I do think you're completely right is non-news articles: think blogs, tweets (although there's not much to summarize in 140chars), product descriptions, scientific articles, etc. These things are produced in much more volume and much less workflow around them.