@budparr Beny will chime in here as well, but I have some background in the newspaper business (with emphasis on paper), and while it certainly has moved towards “illustration stock images from a library”, it is still lots of news, i.e. one-time news-articles with current photos.
Having text + photos packaged together makes totally sense for me. Really easy mental modal that I suspect also scales pretty well.
And if you then want to reuse this later (follow-up article), just reference to the original.