I've found that especially in Mobile browsing, the pagination ends up offering little advantage to anyone, beyond statistics. Mobile versions of news sites will often not have ads, only a small header, the text and the pagination links, so I'm not sure why they would continue to use the technique.

On top of this, I find it very irritating when reading a paginated news article that split to a new page right smack in the middle of a sentence. And it's happened more often than I'd care to remember.