What's interesting to me is how fiercely competitive the "new!" or "now!" market is - many of the content sites and the newspapers & magazines focused on it are dropping like flies. How much room is there if everyone's reporting or commenting on the same thing?

Also, the example he gave, Cracked.com is notorious for linkbaiting, which isn't a bad thing. Even if people are only viewing new content when they visit the site, at least the old articles have a higher chance of showing up in the SERPs later on.