Journalist and the newspapers they work for must find a way to get you the reader to part with your money to fund their enterprises. The online sites do this through link baiting, local newspapers do this through circulars/coupons and piggybacking onto the latest outrage (classifieds died when craigslist was created), and the TV stations rely on murders, perceived and actual racism (George Zimmerman's audio recording being doctored to appear racist) and missing children to get viewers.
The amount of time that it takes to properly source, investigate, corroborate, and expose a story is nothing compared to the piggybacking approach. Example 1 is the University of Virgina fraternity rape story: A single reporter writes up a fantastic expose on a UVA fraternity hazing procedure that includes an alleged gang rape, friends pleading to rape victim not to go to police, and a university system appearing not to care. The correct approach would be to interview the victim, the alleged perpetrators, the university, and the friends to get an idea. Each of these individuals must be contacted, a source found, agree to be a source and then be on record, this all takes time; if you estimate a week per source (very generous) and there are 15 must contact sources (those involved with the alleged gang rape and those friends), that is 15 weeks worth of just putting together information. Then write up the story, anywhere from one to two weeks. Get the editor and the ombudsman to sign off on the sources and information, one week. You have almost 20 weeks invested into a single article, for Rolling Stones that is 5 magazines before getting a single article. And then, at any point the story could turn out to be suspicious to bogus.
Now, be any of the TV shows / newspapers and you simply pull a Puffington Host and extract parts of the story and refer to them in snippets and viola, you save yourself 20 weeks of time and money. That is why the Ryan Holiday stuff is not too surprising.