It makes me wonder if it's really because institutional investors find WSB relevant, or because Bloomberg is flirting with Reddit investors, and trying to attract them to their reporting

At least some part of it has to be the amount of attention these news pieces get on wsb itself. The subreddit has about 1.5 million subscribers. Any news piece by Bloomberg or Wallstreetjournal talking about r/wallstreetbests instantly gets posted over there and usually garners huge amounts of upvotes. Pretty much free traffic/ad impressions.

Example: https://reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/dj5xru/u_did_it...

Yeah; it's a similar phenomenon to when parts of the financial press were taking bitcoin perhaps more seriously than it warranted a few years ago. Good way to expose the enthusiasts to your ads.

Ad money off news stories is a rounding error in the rounding error of Bloomberg's revenue.

but probably not to "Contributing Editor[s]" and the like

I’d subscribe to Bloomberg if it wasn’t $35.00/month.

For that price I can jump in on quite a few others instead.

It's because BBG is a journalism outlet trying to get views. These article doesn't contain relevant information for sophisticated investors (which the large majority of BBG readers are not)

Or if they're playing 4D chess and want more investors to make stupid mistakes by taking advice from WSB. One person's loss is another person's gain.