If they didn't put links in parentheses, they might break compatibility with teletypes! ...I'm not actually suggesting any newspaper still uses actual teletype machines, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are still plenty of workflows that evolved from teletype use.

The teletype and Baudot code do have a pretty amazing legacy. Baudot code was invented in 1870 as a 5-bit mode-shifting character set. This, of course, predates data processing with punch cards (1889), alphanumeric data processing (1929), and binary computers (1937-1941). Even after the introduction of ASCII, the smaller Baudot character set remained a common subset available on a wider range of machines. This is seen in C's "trigraphs", where ??/, for example, may be substituted for \ on machines that don't support that character. Even the Apple II+ had a teletype-style keyboard, supporting only the characters found in Baudot code (the Apple IIe keyboard was the first to support all of the 7-bit ASCII characters).