Why? It's not like a vague apology for all of slavery, it's apologizing to specific people harmed by specific actions taken by the newspaper's founder. It seems

Why? It's not like a vague apology for all of slavery, it's apologizing to specific people harmed by specific actions taken by the newspaper's founder. It seems similar to government apologies for historic injustices, like the US apologizing for the Tuskegee Experiment or conducting a coup in Hawaii, or the UK apologizing for its treatment of Turing. Obviously it sucks that it always seems to take them 50-100 years to make these apologies, but you know, the best time to start is always today. Especially in this case, presumably John Taylor and his funders might not have had the money to found a successful newspaper if they weren't enslaving other people, so this is a very straightforward "our founder did very bad things, we as an organization have benefited a lot from it, so let's try to make it right a bit". Ethical and logical.