As a product offering of their platform they are. As well they were transparent that they were establishing a newsroom...as a product they were offering. Just because other social networks didn't do it doesn't meant it's nefarious.
Beyond that, why would normal have anything to do with what you're offering your users? Do you think Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook thought "what's a normal social media product we can offer"? I guess the whole "go fast and break things" ethos ends with "but totes don't hire journalists and create a newsroom as a possible profit center because some people don't know how to evaluate disparate sources of information on the internet".