The NYT and WaPo have world class developers, and the OpenNews folks are people who very clearly get both the web and the news.
And a project like this serves some concrete needs including one that DocumentCloud itself would benefit from. If this project ends up tackling part of the single sign on problem for news organizations, integration with 3rd party tools & platforms like DocumentCloud becomes a lot easier.
Sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post upload documents to our site, and then embed on their pages. Rather than requiring their users to login to DocumentCloud as well as the host site, we'd love to be able to have a standard way (that has buy-in from news sites) to authenticate users, especially if it's one that allows us to feed back moderation and the like back to the host organization.