I'd recommend checking out Telescope (http://telesc.pe/), it's a very feature-rich news site in the style of hn/reddit, it's very actively developed, has a decent interface/design built-in, and can literally be deployed just by clicking a link (though you can host it on your own server if you want). Many news sites posted on hn tend to use telescope for these very reasons.
Currently hosting on meteor.com is mainly meant for demoing and testing, not as a stable production enviroment. However, with the release of Meteor 1.0, the Meteor Development Group will launch Galaxy, which is a production ready hosting managed hosting platform.
And Telescope does have a simple read-only API, as well as an RSS feed. Depending on the features you need I could probably extend it (or you can submit a pull request).
You can find out more here: http://telesc.pe/
And launch your own instance through Giteor here: https://giteor.com/deploy?git=com.github.SachaG.Telescope.ma...