There's probably a pretty good column in this about how the hyper capitalism of the post-2005 markets is fundamentally inimical to most news organizations. https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/1248258400779145218

The irony is that the newspaper industry was the original platform for hockey stick business growth, which set some really bad context in the setting of the public markets that continues to negatively define their performance.

Newspapers are theoretically stable businesses in the traditional view of how businesses work, but the current market expects them to show their historical "eternal" exponential growth, especially because that's what investors expect of many types of biz.

That's just not going to happen for most. Newspaper growth in the 90s came from a sort of local capture of both advertising and readers that's simply impossible in the modern world. That growth will never come back for most, but that doesn't mean they can't be stable businesses.

But the modern marketplace sees stability as failure. Which, tbh, is bullshit.

The ends result is that publicly traded newspapers are forced to act against their internal interests in attempts to show exponential growth, which inevitably destabilizes them. If investors could be satisfied with slow low growth/stable returns, news cos would act differently.