All you need to 'fix' this is a fast loading news website that gets enough paid subscribers to earn enough margin from subscriptions that you can pay for a news staff, an office, and various overheads.
That is a longish way of saying that 99.9% of the overhead in any modern web site can be traced almost entirely to the mechanisms by which that web site is attempting to extract value from you for visiting/reading.
If people would visit with a 56K modem and deal with a 3 - 10 second page load, then that is the bar. And any spare bandwidth you might have is available for the web site to exploit in some way to generate revenue. The more bandwidth between you and them, the more ways they can come up with to exploit that bandwidth for additional surveillance, ads, or analytics that will get them more money.
When you are the customer, which to say it is your purchasing of a subscription or articles is the only revenue the site needs in order to survive, then the things that retain you as a customer have the highest priority (like fast page load times, minimal bandwidth usage).
But when you are a data cow, a random bit of insight into a picture much bigger than you can comprehend, a pixel in a much larger tapestry, or an action droplet in a much larger river of action. Well then there isn't really any incentive to make your life better, as long as the machine we have milking you for data can get even a couple of molecules more of that precious data milk without scaring you out of the barn. Well we'll build right up to that limit.