I definitely agree that having a much larger ecosystem of news outlets is a big plus of the current era. One can almost watch the flow as things get leaked/scooped on obscure sites, and then often end up after a period of days/weeks/months on one of the "real" sites. (The Damore story and internal Google message traffic is an example.)
The downside is that it's a real grab bag of good stuff, junk, agitprop, and so on. In effect, we've all become journalists, in charge of sifting and verifying information to assemble a NPV story.