Finally made some progress on the feed system. Got everything installed in dev, added a few feeds and I've got stuff importing.

To support title-less feeds, in the mapping for the feed I just put a constant on the title, and then in hook_entity_presave, I'm testing to see if the feed item title is populated and if not I grab the first 200 characters of the feed item description.  

Next I need to build some a View to support the River of News style interface.