In their Reddit AMA I think they said they originally were going to sell a white label Disqus commenting system to newspapers as their product, only to find out

In their Reddit AMA I think they said they originally were going to sell a white label Disqus commenting system to newspapers as their product, only to find out that building it would be easy, but selling it would be extremely hard. So they decided to go with the True/Slant/Examiner/Associated Content/Demand Media model of getting a whole bunch of people publishing in one place to pool their collective Google juice. My sense, from comments made here and there is that they hadn't really been working on the site itself all that long when it launched. Some of the features they said were on the way seemed pretty core to me (letting writers sell their work directly, for example).