Breaking a story like this even five years ago would have required a support staff, ad department, and printing press or TV studio. The old media culture was by no means monopolistic, but it was more parochial and less fragmented than today's. When a relatively small caste of reporters and editors gets to decide what the rest of the country knows, well, they had darn sure better get it right. Undoubtedly, such hard-fast journalistic rules prevented mistakes. But they can also nix many true stories.
Reliability competes with availability.
The Internet is a truly revolutionary development for two reasons. First, on the supply side, the Internet busts up the prestige media's cartel on information production and delivery. By providing an inexhaustible set of alternatives, it highlights, and thus undermines, the institutionalized biases of this elite caste. Second, on the demand side of the equation, the Internet democratizes ethics decisions previously entrusted to elite editors. Not only can people curious about the private lives of public figures satisfy that demand without the interference of censorious editors.