Plenty of people were still saying the Snowden revelations were old hat when they came out, we all knew it was happening just didn't have proof, etc. The novelty and seriousness tends to be out-of-whack with the amount of news coverage. It's a poor way to measure the importance of existing news coverage or lack of it for that reason. What matters is that it gets out and incentivizes developers, manufacturers, company policies, and behavioural change.

There are plenty of hot news scare pieces after boring security leaks all the time bringing awareness to issues that technical people have known well. For ex, I'm hearing about friends older parents putting tape over their laptop cameras.

We love to trash bugs that having marketing brands but these exploits, and more importantly obvious attack surfaces like ME or cellphone modems, often just need the right amount of human-interest story, practical real-life example, and wrapped in good news friendly explanation for regular people to care.

It tends to happen a lot more randomly and without a rational order of priority, but it's still happening more and more often. At the end of the day it's always going to come down to the time and effort of a security researcher caring and the tech community putting the effort in to make the journalists care.