Personally, I've never liked the "News only" vs "Discussion only" threads. I don't know if it really helps reduce the clutter or confusion. In some cases, I think it makes it worse.
One recent example of a story that had both a News and a Discussion thread was the CalgaryNext announcement. That's an especially difficult one to separate what qualifies as "News" and what is "Discussion". If Ken King talks to STHs about the project and someone who was there recaps it, is that news even though it's not a media source? If QR has a call-in show where random people call in to give their opinions, does that qualify as news because it was on a mainstream media outlet even though there was nothing new discussed and everything was just random opinions?
If there's a News thread, discussion of the news updates still has to go into the Discussion thread, so you still end up with the crosstalk and trying to find where the discussion changed as new information came out.
I don't know the logistics of how things work behind the scenes for the Mods, but I'd prefer it if the first post in the thread were to get continually updated to link to the relevant posts with news updates. If you don't want to wade through page after page of outdated discussion, you'd be able to go to the first post in the thread and it will contain links to the posts within that thread where updates were released.
For example, the first post in the Wideman thread could look like this...
I know this is something sureLoss does a lot with the threads he starts. I think it's an effective balance between making megathreads readable without having new threads popping up for every minor update to a developing story.
With the Wideman situation, I think it should definitely get a new thread when the ruling is announced.