Somewhat stale, but still new to me is a piece Cory Bergman penned over at the The Lost Remote. Entitled, "Competing for Last Place" it posits that competition in the news industry actually breeds a deadly sameness. To succeed newsrooms need to strike and cover the same old stories, but with unique angles.
Bergman is mostly focusing on TV newsrooms but in the short term, the thinking is also applicable to news web sites. After being burnt in the mid-90's by wacky innovations (anyone remember the Chicago Tribune's old TV/Flash like front page), news sites on the Web have slowed down the innovation. They're all starting to look like the front of the NY Times.
On the web though, there's still plenty of room to do interesting things, especially in providing services for end users and developers to build on, and still look like everyone else, e.g. Yahoo! News providing RSS feeds.