My favorite example is the coverage of the Dawn Wall rock climb a few years back. It was 'news', but there was very little time pressure for coverage, there was (almost) no divisive/political aspect, and the technical aspects were easy to break down to lay-reader level. Plus, there were thousands of online guides and experts willing to clarify context and terminology for free. It should have been covered flawlessly, just because there was nothing standing in the way of that.

And instead, the results were shameful. There was no real harm done, but most of the articles were less accurate than a Simple English Wikipedia page would have been. It made for an interesting demonstration of how atrocious any form of expert-knowledge news is, even by sites like the NYT, even on uncontroversial topics.