Vox is doing a pretty good job of it. The NYT already has quite a large number of topic pages on a variety of subjects [1], [2]. It's not Wikipedia, but it's not a small number of articles either.
I checked one of the feeds [1]. It's just a list of existing articles, by NYT writers, that don't have meta data. That's not what the NYT article is about. To make the meta tagging work you have to also strip down the article into each individual news event. For example, imagine a list of NYT articles about Yoko Ono. Almost every article about her will mention that she was married to John Lennon, and that he died in 1980. In an article you have to repeat this information because you assume that the physical paper was thrown out each day. But in a news database these events would be separate data events, and would not be repeated. Vox is the same - they still use articles, not data in their place.
[1] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/i...
[2] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...