Not debating your point, but how come in the old days media outlets were able to become profitable when they had (have) both union costs, and costs related to actually printing and distributing a physical good?
And that was just one of the problems that media companies had to track. It'd didn't help that newspapers were just exiting a period of golden complacency in which cities were monopolized by a single newspaper. If you wanted to print an obituary notice for your mom in tiny font in a 4 inch space, you paid $500 because what the hell else were you going to do?. When I was in college one of our professors told us that running a newspaper was like running a printing press that printed money. And he was right. The problem with newspaper companies was that they didn't reinvest enough profit into innovation and experimentation.
Experimentation and investments would have allowed an average newspaper to become (also) a platform like Mode Media, ultimately a waste of money and also wouldn't change the fact that the whole industry is losing profitability - but taking the profit out was obviously useful to the shareholders.
Most companies exist to make money for their owners. Often the best way to do that is to grow and reinvest into more growth, but there certainly are cases where the best option is to milk an existing revenue stream dry and squeeze until it runs out, and place all that money in an entirely different industry - IMHO newspapers a decade ago is a prime example of that situation.
The remainder was ads and classifieds.
Everybody is in trouble.
Quality could be higher because ad reach was based in part on subscriber count, not just the attention-grabby-ness of particular headlines.