Yes it's newsworthy, Aurora or any other event has a limited shelf life, therefore to derive maximum page views each news outlet must differentiate their story to disseminate some new information for each cycle. News always has to have something new. A story about reddit and aurora thus qualifies as news and drives page views because it's related to a current event.

Keep in mind that for Aurora you kind of get quadruple nerd score because of the subject matter, and it's about reddit so you're going to get all the reddit traffic too.

Thinking is hard, if you tell journalists that arabs revolted because Twitter loves freedom then they will write that rather than doing their own research and finding out that people were so hungry they didn't care about the retaliation from the regime.

Same thing with Aurora tell them its about reddit and they'll write that, if IRC had a PR agency then efnet would be where people got their Aurora fix, but since EFNET doesn't and Conde Nast does...