For me, it's the latency. If I'm researching something, I want to read the papers right then so that I can build off of them to do my next round of searches, instead of waiting for stuff to (maybe) trickle in. With scihub, I can do the search-read-search cycle in a matter of minutes rather than waiting hours/days for emails to be replied to.
On the other hand, journalists are also those who would benefit the most from some direct interaction with the authors. The vast majority of them don’t have anywhere near the background necessary to actually understand the articles.
