I'd say this is a new phenomenon, to the extent people no longer read whole newspapers, but individual articles. Previously, there was no point in clickbait beyond optimizing the front page. If a reader bought the paper, that's about all the money you could get from them. In the Internet era, every single article is its own earning unit, so every one has to be optimized to maximize ad impressions. Hence clickbait, chumboxes, slideshows, and countless other forms of crap replacing actual journalism.