Hahaha, I'm so happy to be off the team these days... especially after reading through this thread...
When I do look over there, it's aggressive, baiting, and simply shallow/uninformed, which I don't remember being the case last year.
To people complaining about regurgitating news - most sites to that, and with varying results. Kotaku posts an article, then does Destructoid, then Joystiq, Siliconera, and such. Notice that the news topic within all of them is the same, but the writing is different, maybe the writer adds his opinion or a joke, or some good info about the game - that's not something I would call regurgitating news, and back in my day, it's the straight up news that brought the news section THE most hits, 2x-3x-4x times articles get now, even the most random games could get 1k+.
Now, I do admit to making a couple of baitful articles back when I was on the team, but mainly I was just posting news with my own twist - the ones that people liked, I even have saved in .htm files on my PC. It just makes me feel good. And heck, I was doing great - the best of all the writers back then. That is not necessarily a bad direction, and news had an encompassing audience on this site - not everybody visits many gaming sites but this one.
You simply bring people what they want, and you do it well. What's happening right now is... neither. I'd be really hard pressed if someone asked me to find an audience for "Sony is the next Nintendo" (that article still cracks me up).