Exactly. Sites like BuzzFeed and Vice have some pretty trashy stuff, so people dismiss their small forays into "real" journalism as irrelevant posturing—but I don't think that's the case. In the past, quality journalists went to quality publications because the only place to find quality journalism was in a quality publication. Now, with people getting their articles from aggregators, social media and cross-linking, it's no longer important what publication a writer writes for. A journalist for BuzzFeed can write (nearly) the same article they would for the New York Times, and (nearly) the same people (within the younger audience, at least) will be able to discover it. The publication is less relevant as an institution and a brand — BuzzFeed, HuffPo and the ilk are just investors and CMS's for the work of individual writers.
Tl;dr: online news has been unbundled.