I wish more news site articles would practice this. So many times I'm scanning the damn thing for the bottom line to decide if I want to read all the waffle or not.
Back before the Internet became users' most important news source, newspapers used to do have a hierarchical structure to their stories. The headline would tell you a fair bit, then the first paragraph or two would tell you all the salient points, and each subsequent paragraph would add details.
Now it seems that the important things are buried at the end of the article. The idea seems to be to hook you in and make you keep reading. You hope to find what you're looking for, and in the process stay longer on this page, possibly getting distracted by ads and (intrasite) links.
Support. It seems to be especially common in American publications which begin with a mini-story about some random person before getting to the actual point. E.g., I just looked at [1] which was linked from Hacker News and it starts out with some completely unnecessary details about somebody tripping over a garden hose.
