In an extension to what I wrote above, I used to follow my local newspaper on Facebook a couple of years ago, just in order to keep in touch with local events seeing as I don't have a TV.
I noticed their feed back then starting to change from a simple and useful dissemination of their newspaper articles, into a conduit for posting tabloid style or inflammatory/unverified web links and popular memes.
I questioned them a couple of times on this in the comments area, but was told on both occasions by the page admins that their Facebook page was a 'fun and social' outlet for their paper, and if I wanted 'real news', I should just buy a copy of their actual paper.
Shortly after, I noticed that their print paper started to echo their Facebook feed, in terms of unresearched articles simple copied and pasted from other sources. I stopped following them on Facebook and stopped buying their paper shortly after.
When clicks, eyeballs and stickiness trumps good journalism, then that pretty much closes the door for me.
My theory is that profit destroys many news channels from the inside out.
The channel start with the best intentions of conveying legitimate unbiased news to inquisitive educated audiences... but eventually the supply of news seekers gets depleted, while investors and advertisers demand more. The channel is "forced" to keep expanding so they start catering to people that don't seek out news... steadily devolving into click-bait infotainment articles.
Low-brow content alienates the original news seekers, and they leave for cleaner sources of information... but by now the channel's legitimate reputation is lost. They must double down on the infotainment market to keep turning a profit.
Eventually that gets saturated too, so the channel abandons their original (expensive) legitimate news reporting and continue chasing low-brow audiences, competing against all the other devolved spam-news sites. If their name held enough trust, they might chase profitable corporate/political puff-pieces ("fake news" aka lies).
I'm sure this is what is happening. Income from readership of physical paper goes down, pressure mounts and even reputable news papers feel thsy have little choice... ask any journalist. It is brutal, earning a decent living is hard, earning it from actual quality reporting is impossible because the vast majority of customers can't separate anote article written in 10 minutes without any research or fact checking from the results of a 1 year research has undercover project...
So yeah, no surprise they deliver more of the 10 minute pieces and quality goes down. If we don't pay we get what we pay for - nothing. Hot air..
I noticed their feed back then starting to change from a simple and useful dissemination of their newspaper articles, into a conduit for posting tabloid style or inflammatory/unverified web links and popular memes.
I questioned them a couple of times on this in the comments area, but was told on both occasions by the page admins that their Facebook page was a 'fun and social' outlet for their paper, and if I wanted 'real news', I should just buy a copy of their actual paper.
Shortly after, I noticed that their print paper started to echo their Facebook feed, in terms of unresearched articles simple copied and pasted from other sources. I stopped following them on Facebook and stopped buying their paper shortly after.
When clicks, eyeballs and stickiness trumps good journalism, then that pretty much closes the door for me.