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.