alt Hacker News(Not GP poster.) I don't really have a problem with masonry layouts, but a newspaper is limited by the paper size and they have incentive to squeeze everything in there (to maximize the spread of "information"). The screen is theoretically infinite (although not for kiosks).
I do have a website with a lot of images, and at the moment everything is in a 3-across grid layout...
The screen is infinite but information should still be prioritized, that is why newspapers use different sizes of headings. If they truly wanted to jam everything in there, they'd use the same small font size and save on paper, but that's not what people like because they want to see at a glance what is important and what's not, and that's done by the font size initially. This is no different on an infinite screen, the design principle of information prioritization still holds.