Our Daily Bleg: Looking for the Best Online News

A reader named Chuck Amos writes:

My bleg is for a list of reliable, unbiased, and intelligent news sources that present general information in a readable and user-friendly way.
This seems like a very simple problem to solve, but my efforts over the years have been unsatisfactory. Sites like CNN.com are presented reasonably well, but the actual “news” is way too fluffy. Sites like Huffington Post are so miserable to look at that I’m not willing to sift through the train-wreck presentation and look for articles that might be interesting. Sites like Salon.com are willing to dig deeper than many of the mainstream news sites, but the politics are biased and therefore fail the test of what I seek.
To make my search more difficult, I don’t care about video (I have limited time, and I’d rather spend 20 seconds skimming/reading a written article than 90 seconds watching a newscast), and the amount of garbage that comes across Twitter feeds makes that outlet of limited use to me.
I’ve had reasonably good experiences with the Economist, Christian Science Monitor, and Guardian sites, but none of them leaves me completely satisfied.
My perfect news site would simply be a list of headlines that link to well-written, well-researched articles on a broad variety of topics. Sort of like an AP feed, but with articles that contain more than 2 poorly written paragraphs.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Chuck sounds like a nice guy but … hard to please! I wrote back to him:

Have you tried Google News? In some ways, it’s a dreadful aggregator, but it’s so easy to sort the dreadful from the potentially good that it can be useful. But what I suspect you are really seeking is a software/app solution, so you can easily customize the right news to get pushed your way on a daily basis. Anyway … we’ll see what the crowd has to say on this.

His reply:

Thank you for the note, I’m glad to read it’ll be posted. Google News is fine for topics I know, but part of what I love about reading the news is stumbling on a fascinating article on a topic about which I know nothing. I lose that element of surprise with Google News or other user-defined aggregators. Frankly, that’s the very reason I read your site … you make me interested in topics that are normally not interesting to me. Good news sites do the same thing.

All right, then readers. Can you help out Chuck, whether it’s a site, an aggregator, an app, etc.?