The story is the source, not the content.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/1...
Justin Keller was a nobody.
A news story presents novel recent events, given context by a narrative. The title of a piece informs the reader of that narrative.
It is a given that when Breitbart posts an article about a shooting in Chicago, it's not about the shooting, it's about the narrative: Black people love doing murders. When people complain about right-wing media pushing crime stories, they're not saying that the crimes didn't happen, but that they object to the narrative being advanced.
Here, the narrative is that "tech bros" are sexists, and that SF companies are filled with tech bros, who make racist products.
(The Atlantic hot take explicitly states this: "The kind of computing systems that get made and used by people outside the industry, and with serious consequences, are a direct byproduct of the gross machismo of computing writ large. More women and minorities are needed in computing because the world would be better for their contributions—and because it might be much worse without them." Google has to have minority programmers, because otherwise Google will make sexist websites. This is something of an odd assertion-- you would figure that it would be much more important to change Google's management, but Brin, Page and Schmidt are important DNC donors, so the Atlantic can't suggest that their shares be seized.)
An anonymous essay, on the other hand, would be one where the author doesn't identify himself as a white male Google employee first, and instead just talks about the actual issue at hand. Just look at the thread here, and the one earlier, about the essay itself. Many people agreeing with the author, and yet none of them are being roasted alive on social media. Why? Because nobody's started their comment with "I'm a VP at Microsoft, and I think that..."
Without a hook for a narrative, the story would just be "sexists exist on the internet", which is very much not News.
That's a very postmodern take on it.
See, for example, this debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke:
Steven Pinker & Elizabeth Spelke | The Science of Gender & Science | Mind Brain Behavior Discussion