Whether JavaScript is a good fit for a news site and whether news sites should be single page apps are two separate questions. It's possible to build a server rendered React app without requiring any client JavaScript execution at all.

News sites are also more complex than you would assume. I went from building products at Facebook to a large news site. What shocked me was the surface area of the user facing products. There were so many little one-off pieces of functionality and randomly integrated services. Tools like React and Relay make it much easier to manage this complexity and promote code reuse.