> their previous actually-kinda-nice attempts to give a proper home to professionally-written journalistic content, such that it's not jarringly intermingled with memes, baby photos, and humblebrags.

This was nice while it lasted, but it was facing a lot of flak for it. Several news outlets were talking about how facebook was censoring news and only allowing 'democrat/liberal' news and blocking news from more conservative news outlets (which tend to be terrible, but oh well)

So they had to shut it down, and set up algorithmic news aggregator, which lead to the fake news problem.