[cogman10]

I think it's just another example of enshitification.

Newspapers can't make the bills with just subscriptions, so they start selling ads. Ad revenue starts dropping so they add more ads. More ads cause less readers. Cost cutting measures erodes at the quality of journalism. And then a big media company swoops in, buys the company, fires basically everyone, and turns the newspaper into one of the uniform newspapers that they also own eschewing all local issues. That further drops subscribers and trust which simply leads to more misleading garbage.

Throughout the process, yes people cared less. But also quality decreased which made people care even less.

My parents who have had a newspaper subscription for 50 years have cancelled their subscriptions a couple of years ago because of how garbage the paper is.