[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.