I do get it. I just have a different point of view. There is probably no story here at all, but legal documents have everything to do with his job. Probably the adoption records will remain sealed, that doesn't mean that journalist shouldn't try to find out everything they can about him. This isn't attack journalism, at least not yet. In the times that I have dealt with NYT reporters they were tedious fact checkers, (or at least at one time when they had tough editors). Most of the stuff they get never makes it to print.
If however, and this is a fictional scenario, they discover that the biological mother of the kids was paid 100,000 dollars, it says nothing about the kids, but would tell us something about Roberts.