Also, the 'distance' to an object at very high redshift is not uniquely defined because the Universe has expanded a lot since the time the light we see left it. There are several types of cosmological distance measure which are not interchangeable, and the story doesn't tell us which one is being used.
What was actually measured by the observation isn't a distance, it's a redshift, which can be converted to one of these distance measures under the assumption of a standard cosmology.
So for scientifically literate readers it would be more meaningful to report the redshift directly (not bury it in the last paragraph) and/or the age of the Universe when the galaxy was observed.
