But this only punts the question forward: why do they still use this reduced character set, when most (if not all) of their data is transmitted over the internet?
* News wires are large old distributed networks. There may still be old equipment attached to it that natively uses this encoding; or modern software may still be using the compatible encoding because it was never practical or cost-effective to have a "flag day" to switch over.
* Even if the technical limitation has been lifted, the convention may live on as part of the folklore of the field.