Agreed. The article is measuring the wrong thing: a company doesn't care about high readership of the initial bad news; it wants to get bad news out of the way

Agreed. The article is measuring the wrong thing: a company doesn't care about high readership of the initial bad news; it wants to get bad news out of the way as quickly as possible and have the conversation switch to something else. They are counting on short attention spans. That's why it's common to release bad news late on Friday or just before some event that the media will all be talking about. This article doesn't seem to get that and is measuring the wrong thing.