News magazine journalism might be a more useful
comparison. The thing
that strikes me about our famously good current event articles - e.g.
on the Indian Ocean quake or the Virginia Tech massacre - is that they
read like good articles from a news magazine and were in fact
reasonably well written even while undergoing fast changes. Not
immaculate essays, but good, readable and informative.
The credit for that could easily go to a single person who was keeping
it all together as lots of people added new information as it came to
light. Getting one or two articles right is easy (and if they happen
to be the really noticeable ones, then great!), getting them all right
is much harder.