In theory, news would be more rebust than mail, because of its distributed nature and it should be possible to make news work without relying on the DNS.
Many of us do not run news servers, and you have to 'login' to access it. E-mail works because it is ubiquitous. IRC and Mud type interfaces are probably better for casual use, and real time coordination during outages, crisis or events requiring synchronous participation. When we start having weird network conditions, I have learned to quickly scan my mailbox for NANOG and Dshield and a few other lists.. sometimes it helps. E-Mail's great for this. It's there when I need it. A more robust configuration for the NANOG e-mail list would be my first choice. Maybe a backup east/west coast listserv address: nanog@.... just syncing the mailing list address daily would be enough? I've got mailman running....