So good -- I remember seeing one in the NYT when the George Zimmerman jury verdict was reached, that was just a XX/XX/XXXX in the date section. Assuming they had both articles written.
I suspect this will only become more and more common in the "publish first, edit later" evolving world of online journalism.
It's been standard practice since long before the Web to have pre-written obituaries for high profile people (politicians, royals, the Pope, etc.) and to update them periodically. When someone of this stature dies, the newspapers will have multiple pages of content ready to roll-out with minimal editing.
Some people once found a bunch of work-in-progress obits on CNN's website:
It is known that news organizations already have obits for prominent figures written and ready to be published at a moment's notice. CNN accidentally exposed some of these in 2003.
The other way to look at it is that it is the logical way to go about optimizing delivery times. Parallelize everything you can. I don't see why people are shitting on it, it's not like you'll wait for the designer to pretty up your web app before you can implement the functionality you want.
I suspect this will only become more and more common in the "publish first, edit later" evolving world of online journalism.