[Sniffnoy]

This seems to be part of a more general phenomenon of businesses being run by people who don't know that area of business, and who direct all focus away from the quality of the product, doing things such as cutting costs even when the resulting lower quality makes the company less profitable, not more. (For instance, Shamus Young has written a fair bit[1] about this phenomenon in the video game industry, although there cost-cutting does not seem to be its primary manifestation.)

It's not entirely clear what's to be done about this; we generally assume that businesses might disregard others' well-being in pursuing their own interest, but what do you do when instead they're just stupidly destructive, serving nobody's interest?

(Of course part of what's going on here seems to be that, due to principal/agent problems, it's not really serving nobody's interest; the shareholders lose out, but the executives, who are paid a salary, and thus rely not on the impersonal evaluation of the market but their own ability to convince people they're doing a good job, do not seem to lose out in the same way...)

[1] For instance, here: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eas-problem-isnt-greed/

[helipad]

To be fair I don't think the cited paper being profitable before necessarily means they are not now they've been bought out, though I take your point that in aggregate their parent company is paying off debt.

Once the papers are reduced to sources that come in via weekly feeds, you no longer need boots on the ground journalists to report the stories. You can write the stories from anywhere, predictably, with automated or offsite writers.

The end goal seems to be: look at this huge organization with a fraction of the overhead, with vast reach, that has predictable if small margins, but that's profitable across thousands of publications. That's the sort of thing that keeps shareholders happy, it just happens to be at the expense of a public good.