Good observation. It's the purest form of intellectual laziness.
(I agree these are cheap, fluff news--but it's hard to judge most individual reporters when you know the ground financial truth of the industry. Even at pretty venerable publications people are having to hustle hard for salaries that few people with programming jobs in the same city would even entertain. People at smaller legacy news outlets are working for schoolteacher wages or worse without the benefits or job security.)
In 2003--my freshman year in college--I worked for the online desk at my hometown newspaper. I worked overnight. Once the print paper was ready, I reviewed and massaged automatically-converted copies of the for-print layout to ensure they were ready to publish online and manually pulled them from the quark files if they weren't. Our online desk was in one corner of a cavernous newsroom with scores and scores of desks, between the compositor and the sports desk.
There were more sports reporters working the desk next to me in 2003 than the total number of reporters left at the entire paper now. The industry is a husk.