That problem being made more difficult because the definition of what is a 'news site' or 'journalist' these days is vague. What went wrong was that the code didn't have any allowance for newspaper articles, or somehow incorrectly classified that article. So they have a bot which bans links to article which mention reddit employees by name which hands out auto-bans to prevent that behavior. Pretty obviously what happened is they've had incidents in the past where a blogger would publish an article on one of their employees and then redditors would start spamming that article on reddit to dox them - in a coordinated action so the blog article was written for the purpose of doxxing the employee.
