[kevingadd]

Given how much of this is driven by upper management and ownership - just like Pivot To Video and other historically disastrous moves - I'm not really sure how much they can self-interrogate here. It'd basically end up being a takedown of their bosses, which always goes over well. If you're told to publish multiple articles a day (or even one piece per day) this limits your ability to do deep research or heavily-edited writing, and policies like that are common.

FWIW some unionized web news outlets HAVE been writing about this lately, but it's usually in response to ownership laying off chunks of their team and telling them to stick to clickbait. It happened recently at a couple of outlets that were (years back) originally owned by Gawker and changed owners multiple times.

[makomk]

Yeah, the main complaint of the ex-Gawker outlets seemed to be that management weren't letting them use their clickbait to manipulate public opinion in the political arena anymore and were making them stick to topics that were actually related to what the site was ostensibly about.

[lonelappde]

What is a site "ostensibly about"?