Essentially I am looking for a smart RSS client; can you recommend one?

RSS readers work well to track simple blogs that publish in a "stream of consciousness" fashion (that is, one idea after another, roughly in the order that they are thought up by the author).

News sites (think BBC, the Economist, foreign affairs, the Atlantic, etc) are a different beast... they publish a lot of content all the time and it's not all equally important. The top stories linger on top of the home page for a long time, while minor ones either get pushed to the bottom or leave the front page quickly altogether.

I think there's value in the editor's judgement of their own content, so I'm looking for an app that understands and keeps track of it in order to make it accessible to the user. For example I'd want to ask "what were the 10 stories that lingered on the front page of the bbc the longest in the last week" or "all stories that made it to the top 2 spots in the last 3 days" or some combination thereof.

Do you know of any such app? (Or do you want to build one? I'd certainly be a paying customer!)

Thanks!