Know of any good explanation for why news sites are so bogged down? I frequently have to close them on my phone because it can't handle the articles.

It seems like, other things equal, slow sites will do worse. So they must be getting some massive advantage to having so much cruft, otherwise they wouldn't do it.

Of my day to day, it seems like only Hacker News, Paul Graham's site, and a few other holdouts load quickly and are easy to read.

There's also less user generated content in google searches. All of that has moved to Facebook, Reddit, twitter. What remains in searches is more commercial content.