It's happened to most reporters at least once: Some government official drops a bombshell of an announcement at a really inconvenient time -- like an hour before deadline or late at night, knowing the newspaper will not be able to give the issue much coverage before going to press.

But The New York Sun today reported that practice may be on the way out, thanks to "a headlong collision with hundreds of liberal Web loggers in the wee hours of yesterday morning."

Monday night, Department of Justice officials delivered some 3,000 pages of e-mails, memos and more about the controversial firing of several U.S. attorneys.  "The handover came so late that many news organizations had to scramble to try to skim a few headlines from the files before latenight deadlines," according to The Sun.

But the Web has no such printing press deadlines, and the medium allows for some quick collaboration: TPMMuckraker.com readers banded together, and they posted analysis and excerpts long before the first morning newspapers hit readers' driveways.

Mark Fabiani, an attorney in the Clinton administration, said his preference during his White House years was to dump major things right before the weekend. Now, that wouldn't work quite so well.

The bloggers efforts weren't perfect, The Sun reported: "For one thing, the lack of any central direction or assignments led to a huge duplication of effort, as well as repetitive posts in which bloggers recounted their identical "Eureka!" moments. Early this morning, one sensible poster suggested a Wikipedia-type Web page would be more efficient at organizing information than the comments section of a blog."

What is clear is that collaborative journalism via the Web and no press deadline is reinventing journalism -- reference Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero for the latest example of this.

(Also, check out the Online Journalism Review's "Lessons from 'Talking Points Memo' and the U.S. attorney scandal". In it, Robert Niles writes, "[Talking Points Memo's Joshua] Marshall and those like him reveal the irony of online news competition. Success lies not in fighting competing voices, but in embracing them. With more voices reporting, journalists now can reveal a more complete and accurate truth for their readers.")