My guess is that it has more to do with pressure to spit out a lot of stories combined with cutbacks in editorial staff
Nah, mitlen's on target. If you look at the bottom of any story from any major news source these days you'll see a bunch of click bait third party stories powered by Taboola or similar companies. The goal is to get clickbait headlines so people open the page, skim the story, then click on one of the funny, sexy, or scandalous links at the bottom to some slide show ad view special.
I have a friend who works as an environmental law analyst for a firm that Bloomberg picked up. He was recently removed from the writing team because his stuff was too dry and was written for people behind the paywall. Didn't drive revenue enough.