The internet was a contributing factor, but not it alone. In the 90s the internet became just another publishing platform when newspaper revenues were at a hig

The internet was a contributing factor, but not it alone. In the 90s the internet became just another publishing platform when newspaper revenues were at a high. They were cash-cow investments for large corporations. It followed a similar pattern to SV companies now—buy up high revenue properties promising ever-increasing returns. As soon as that started to level off investors will obviously darken on the large corps they have shares in. Large corp needs to keep finding ways to find profit in their properties so they started cutting, which put publishers in worse situations for affording and producing content. That started a vicious downward cycle. Couple that with falling advertising prices (in part because of Google and Amazon, but not solely) and it’s a race to the bottom for these corps in managing their properties. One I worked for [the parent corp] had enormous amounts of money from their main ventures but had us at a continually reducing hard-capped headcount in spite of increases in revenues after a lot of hard work. Every year saw mass layoffs for several years in a row in the order of 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire publishing company’s staff at a time including writers, editors, designers, managers, videographers, researchers, sales staff, marketing staff, you name it. [edited for detail: in one instance taking a fully-staffed heritage political and analysis magazine down to a couple of desks in a corner of a floor they once filled with passionate, talented people. With contractual obligations made by former executives for volume of content.] Basically crippling the [publishing] company every year a little more because of fixed numbers they had to serve to shareholders based on previous, naive promises made by long-gone executives. So the internet—not directly. Greed, primarily. (I’ll leave this with an old protest sign I spotted in a book in the City Lights Bookstore in SF—paraphrasing—“free the press from their corporate masters”. If only)