I used to work for the Denver post - them and quite a few other newspapers have been bought out by a venture (vulture) capital firm that lays off most of the staff and then makes nonsensical moves like this to dry and drive short term revenue. Absolutely brutal loss of historied local news organizations.

It’s a huge shame this is happening, but more of a shame that no at the paper successfully innovated to survive the switch to digital.

I hope that is the version that Google indexes, so that this page will not rank for the target keywords.

Cute:

https://i.imgur.com/4TbI3s7.png

Doesn't appear to happen in FF's reader view.

Seems to be an anti ad-block measure. I don’t care enough to disable it on my phone.

Do you have Adblock extensions? For another data point, I’m using iOS/safari through a Pi-hole and see the article fine. I wonder if it’s triggered by certain extensions.

Seems a bit silly, you can just tell Safari to not allow Reader mode.

Works fine for me on Firefox

https://i.imgur.com/yQGb6Nq.png

Maybe it's an extension you've got installed? I wasn't able to reproduce it (on macOS Safari). What reader are you using?

Text looks normal in Reader View in Firefox.

I wonder how that intersects with the ADA.