As an insider in the industry I can tell you the digital news era is well and truly over. We are in the influencer age now. And this has all been part of a purposefully executed plan by the big web platforms to keep people on their sites and apps rather than have them leave and go to external domains. Any online publication that wants to survive will have to run with a skeleton team full of workaholics. And that will be just to break even and get by.
It's not over entirely but that fight for clicks and eyeballs thankfully is. We're back to the subscription model and it's going to take time to get consumers full back to where we were 30 years ago. Companies like NY Times and Axios have been thriving.