I was thinking about this yesterday as well. I used to read newspaper's website's, but now I just go on aggregates like hubski and reddit. Every time I read something on a news website, and click a few links and find an interesting article, I don't post it because I assume someone else already has. I wonder who trolls these websites looking for breaking news to post. Especially on a site like reddit, it must be almost as soon as a big story is printed that it gets posted, is there a group of people in a perpetual race to post the big stories, or do news websites post stories themselves...?
Call me crazy, but I feel like some users may have reached out to those newspaper sites and offered to spread their content, for a fee. I think this is where the 'social media rep' job title comes from. You get paid to build following from sites like reddit, facebook, etc.