To be fair to the local news company, the tooling to create a PDF was probably not something they had. And I'm sure they were sold on the idea of an app by who

To be fair to the local news company, the tooling to create a PDF was probably not something they had. And I'm sure they were sold on the idea of an app by whoever does own their authoring tools. Reminds me of the odd story of microfilm. I may be out of date, at this point, but my understanding is a ton of libraries were convinced to destroy large parts of their archive to convert into microfilm on the idea that this would be more resilient and easier to work with. Sadly, it has turned out to be neither.