It's not even that. It's all about click through.
I pretty much think all real news articles are completely dead.
Historically, there were always catchy headines in newspapers. But they had some factualality to them, and if not they were trash rags like the National Enquirer, a newspaper sold at grocery checkouts, often explaining how a celebrity was really an alien, or time traveller, or some such.
Real newspapers had to adhere to some standards, and usually ran mostly on sales for revenue.
They sold ads, and classified ads, but they were paid papers, and each paper sold meant more profit, and for advertising revenue.
This meant that if the paper had a headline, but the headline was a lie/untruthful, some people would get upset and demand their money back.
And if this continued, people would stop buying it, because they were paying for it, and who wants to buy something which lies to get sold?!
Beyond that, if the article was poorly written, if the article was poorly researched, many would be annoyed at wasting cash. If the newspaper ended up with a reputation for this, sales would likely drop.
Point is, when paying hard cash for something, people typically demand something of value in return.
Compare that to today, where modern news is like a poster someone stuck on a lamp post. Are you gonna complain, if the free poster is just made up drivel?!
Modern news is this. Nothing you read has any incentive to be true, the only incentive is to get you to click, and look at the ads.
So you do, because OMG! Bad thing happened!
Modern democracies depend upon pillars of society to hold it up, news being one of them.
And news used to serve this purpose, being primarily consumer facing.
And now it's not. Now, it's gone.