Great discussion taking place here. Didn't realize this would be heartily discussed. I'll be responding to most of the comments later on today.

@Ryan - I agree. In fact, most times I don't bother writing about anything that shows up in the dashboard because too many people will know about that information and anything else is just an echo. However, I think my recent post dealing with WordPress 2.8 and the release date is an example of something you are talking about where I added some more unique information to the post. In fact, I received a comment from someone when BuddyPress 1.0 was released that my post covering the event was a breath of fresh air because I wrote about it differently than most other people.

However, it's pretty easy to succumb to the notion of spreading the news even if it's published on a big publication. For example, while the WordPress Dev blog was the first to publish the info regarding the release of WordPress 2.8, I published the same information and a few people treated my post as if it's the first time they heard about the news.