Pictures and text often pair nicely together. You have an article about a thing, and the picture illustrates that thing, which in many cases helps you understand the thing better. But on the web, this logic no longer holds, because at some point it was decided that all texts demand a picture. It may be of a tangentially related celeb. It may be a stock photo of a person making a face. It may be a Sony logo, which is just the word SONY. I have been thinking about this for a long time and I think it is stupid. I understand that images — clicks is industry gospel, but it seems like many publishers have forgotten their sense of pride. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it's hard for me to imagine there'll be much value in the text of an article illustrated by a generic stock image.
As with so many problems, social media seems to deserve much of the blame for this. Until the mid-to-late '00s, a publication's homepage played a dominant role in driving people to individual articles. Homepages mostly mimicked the front pages of newspapers, where major stories—things that warranted investment in original art—had images. Other stories just got a headline. Over time, the endless space of the internet lowered the standard for which articles needed art, but still, not everything got an image.
Then Facebook and Twitter disrupted, in the traditional "made things worse" sense, the biz. Now when a user shares an article on their sites, a thumbnail image provides a preview of the article. If an article doesn't have an image, social media will still pull in whatever it can—usually this is just a blown-up version of the website's logo, though sometimes it's another unrelated image from the same page, e.g. a thumbnail from another article. If the social media site can't find any image at all, only the headline will be displayed. Websites fear that this makes them look unprofessional—or worse, boring—and drives away potential clicks. Even the fucking Economist now has a photo on every article on its website.
I believe this is wholly unnecessary. When I read a news story about how Donald Trump is a cruel semi-sentient lump of putty, I do not necessarily need to see a photo of him. If a publication has a new picture, something that provides added context to whatever the latest thing is that he's done to destroy our future, then by all means, include it. Otherwise, I already know what he looks like.
Worse still are articles about Facebook. At least Trump's pictures are sometimes funny; Mark Zuckerberg just perpetually looks like Justin Timberlake's cousin who's an RA. Like Trump, though, Facebook is also doing its best to destroy whatever good things are left, so Zuckerberg is in the news a lot. And every time he is, websites have to come up with an image to go at the top of the post. Because not having art would be unthinkable, websites feel compelled to upload yet another photo of Mark in the same shirt against the same light blue background, lest they yield to just literally posting the Facebook logo.