One tendril of the problem is that online delivery enables organizations to track engagement at a more granular level than "which articles generated lots of let

One tendril of the problem is that online delivery enables organizations to track engagement at a more granular level than "which articles generated lots of letters to the editor?" I suspect it takes a lot of integrity, stubbornness, or stupidity to continually plow resources into reporting out, writing, and editing eat-your-vegetables articles instead of reallocating those resources towards the content people engage with.