Here's an idea for next time. Assuming you don't need the data in real time, but instead just need to be able to say, when X story broke, we broke it first 80% of the time.
This is probably a stupid idea but I've only given it a few minutes of thought, so thats all you get tonight :)
Take automatic snapshots of news pages, like Drudge.com, cnn.com or whatever you want to compare to. Maybe once a minute.
Now hook it up with Mechanical turk and pose the question (in turker language its HIT (human intelligence task), "does X story appear on this page at 10:00pm?". They answer as true or false, then keep moving the capture forward and keep asking the question.
