Central Content Site with Affiliate Sites

Alright, this one might get a little convoluted. I will try to explain this as best I can to see if it is possible or has been done before.

I work for a Corporation that has multiple satellite sites that each have their own independent website look and feel. The satellite affiliates have a limited staff so writing a lot of stories by themselves gets to be a hassle and they don’t always have time for it. I would like to pool the resources together so that they can write stories that can be picked up by all the other affiliates.

So I guess the question becomes, is there a way to hack WordPress to allow one installation where the blog posts are written, but another installation to allow each individual affiliate site to pick up those posts but have their own design and metrics (pageviews, etc)?

I am thinking this could be done on a grab all or nothing blog post basis by using two databases and hacking wordpress into looking to one database for the articles/tags, etc and another for the individual design…

I’d be grateful to any feedback you guys may have on the subject.

Thanks