The less money newspapers have, the less independent work they can do. When you're a newspaper hemorrhaging revenue, what do you cut? Not sports. Not style. No

The less money newspapers have, the less independent work they can do. When you're a newspaper hemorrhaging revenue, what do you cut? Not sports. Not style. Not the stuff people read. Not the ability to report rumors faster than the next guy. That's your bread and butter. Editors. Fact-checking. You can clean up your balance sheet without threatening business continuity by "improving efficiency" and getting all those layers out of the way. Validating claims about Hussein and Al Qaeda basically amounts to foreign intelligence work. That costs expensive people's expensive time with a very high risk that they won't be able to arrive at any conclusions. Do you expect a manager to authorize a sat-phone when he can't even make payroll? Newspapers in general do the best they can afford to. They're not the world's advertising platform anymore, so what they can afford to do is of course declining.