Every year google makes a big change and rewards best websites....yeah right i have burst traffic in some sites during this period having all the donts of google guidelines.
Hello, Yes, every day Google makes small Algo updates, and sometime big ones, this is an alarm to be aleart to create good content and create a community in your website.
I don't see why news sites weren't ranking higher to begin with - maybe the others had way too spammy links - like Associatedcontent, Ezinearticles, etc - because why would google knock out good sites? It doesn't make sense - something else was happening to those sites that only the webmasters/Google know about it. I've been working online since 2004 - and most spam sites tend to get knocked outta search real fast.
I would imagine it's mainly due to their having duplicate content. Every major news agency reposts AP stories and the like as well as picking up stories that were posted first by their local affiliates.