"a beacon of all that was great and wonderful about social media"
The issue was most journos are "social" people and nosy ones :) And despite their job, many of them may not be the most successful one in their social groups - especially those following tech news.
Media organizations too like easy sources of personal data, especially gossip and a variety of silly ones. They saw it as a source of easy revenues.
The idea they could find a lot of people activities, feelings and thought - and lot of images - looked incredible to them. Look at how they raid social profiles of dead people... once it took a lot of effort to collect those data and publish them to attract morbid readers. I think they started to believe Santa Claus was real.
That coupled with strong PR efforts made FB the darling of most media. Only a few one understood how dangerous it was since the beginning - and that even without knowing before how Zuckerberg made it starting raiding female students photos to build on "men's" basic instincts... yet the honeymoon lasted too long.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
