Unfortunately, the world we live in requires some money to have professional journalism. Even if these folks were non-profit, they'd still need some money to get by and do the stuff (pay reporters, curate a website, print physical newspapers, and so on).
They have to play to survive. Sure, this could be fixed in a myriad of ways, each having their own set of issues, but most of us aren't in a position to do that.
It;'s pretty clear to me that, yes, while it's a turn of phrase, they are clearly intensely focused on metrics like shares. He talks of "misses" and "strike outs" in other places.
It's no wonder that the mainstream has been adopting more and more of the tactics of content farms with clickbait headlines and articles that are more about generating outrage and "shares" than anything else.
A "great" article is defined by how many shares it gets. It's no wonder that high quality, long form, real journalism is slowly fading away. It doesn't pay to do any of that when the only money left is chasing FB shares all the way to the bottom.
Even if you want to be uncharitable about that, it's pretty clear the author is talking about Facebook and not Journalism.