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What you describe is a big part of it, but it's only part. The other big thing that happened is the near-total loss of ad revenue. Facebook built really good microtargeting, so that it became more cost-effective to advertise on their product to reach a local audience than to advertise on local news outlets, and Craigslist did the same for classifieds.
The result looks like this for most outlets:
Subscriptions are only a partial workaround for some news outlets; you can't actually charge a subscription for most local news — not enough people can pay it to result in a viable publication.
In any case, this loss of revenue means that the typical local outlet can't afford anything like the level of reporting they had 20 years ago.
The capitalist model is failing the journalism industry. Is there a way to build a mutual aid network for good journalism?
I'm not even sure it's the capitalist model that failed it. Whether capitalist communist or whatever, we have plenty of evidence is that this is what happens to Institutions in general.
An institute of some kind is created, let's say the New York Times, for example. Over time, the Institution grows and excels at the goals it was originally created for (quality journalism, for the NYT). Eventually, all the people who originally created it die off and they are replaced by new people with no connection to the creation or ideals of the Institution. This happens several more times, each time the group of leaders becoming more and more distanced from the original goals of the institution and becoming more or less "enablers of the status quo." When the institution no longer servers its initial purpose, it does not shut down, it simply moves into protecting itself and it's purpose becomes extending it's own existence for the sake of extending it's own existence. The people who now work there view it as a job and if the place they work shuts down they won't have a job but they're so far away from the reasons it was created to begin with, they're making all the wrong choices to try to save it because they're just trying to save it instead of finding a new reason for it to exist and throw away the original framework that is no longer working.
This is the path of institutions, no matter the political or economic style being used. They start amazing, grow large and useful, then slowly become behemoths disconnected from their original goals and ideals and start existing simply for the sake of existing because nobody would know what to do without them, even though they're currently failing their goals miserably.
Traditional news media has been this behemoth that exists simply for the sake of existing for a long, long time. They've been unwilling to adapt for decades now.
It's the path of strongly hierarchical institutions. The hierarchy itself skews bullshitters and sociopaths into power over time, and it becomes self-justifying and drops the core goals as you point out.
Flatter hierarchy institutions seem to have some immunity to this if the central goals are sufficiently motivating. The Quakers manage a fairly enduring fidelity to their original principles, for instance, and I admire their organizational methods and commitment to good works, if not their mythology. At a much smaller scale, nonprofits and cooperatives I have been involved with also have more or leas success avoiding institutional rot based on that combination of clear goals and power sharing.
I'm interested/hesitant to see what becomes of Linux after Linus Torvalds retires/dies. I think the Linux Kernel Mailing List fits the kind of flat structure you're speaking of, and I do wonder if it will retain that structure without Torvalds.
These flatter structureware more resistant to it yes, but it takes a lot of cohesive philosophy. Quakers have such a depth of philosophy behind their loose organization that you even have Non-theist Quakers who don't believe in a Christian God but still believe in the power of the fundamental values of community. The Friends are some cool people for sure and are still going strong despite being a minority in the larger US Christian population.
Hm good point, and the techbro loligarchs will be gunning for control over areas like that, so it will be under pressure.
Not a popcorn show though. More like fingernail lunch.
Kinda like the character assassination misinformation campaign that temporarily sidelined RMS from the FSF. My pet conspiracy theory is that that was motivated by people who wanted the FSF to move away from its hard-line "copyleft for the benefit of the end-users rights" stance and become more accepting of corporate exploitation of Free Software.
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%202006%20(Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party)
He wrote this, on his own volition, without anyone forcing his hand, at the age of fifty-three years old. Fifty-three. It took him until he was in his sixties to be talked out of this position. This was posted on his public facing website. He chose to write this and show the world.
I'm sorry, no matter how great his contributions were, this was and is beyond the pale for the face of a public organization. It shouldn't take you until you're nearly sixty to figure out how that's deeply wrong.
Honestly, I actually lump Stallman in with figures like Musk because they're always making dumbfuck off the cuff remarks like this because they think they're far more clever than they actually are.
I personally think he is the kind of person who hurts the organization and makes it difficult for the organization to connect with regular people, which is what it has to do if it actually wants to make headway in the world instead of being some fucking sweaty nerd club.
How was this a character assassination and misinformation campaign again? This is what he chose to write, on his own website, in his own words, unforced. It was more gross that it took over a decade for it to matter to anyone.
EDIT: I'm gonna quote myself with something I just wrote elsewhere, in response to https://www.opm.gov/fork
And that's exactly how I feel about all these recursive name joke bullshit that RMS always did. "Gnu's Not Unix" hurr hurr hurr get fucked, that stupid nerd shit humor is literally fucking up our government right now. I never cared for it, it's dumb elitist bullshit that a lot of people who aren't mathy just don't get. That alienates people, it doesn't bring them in.
RMS is also someone who, on his own volition, came up with his own set of gender-neutral pronouns over a decade ago, before it was cool.
The point is, the guy is egalitarian to a fault: he wrote the stuff you quoted not because he was trying to defend predatory adults, but because he was skeptical about disregarding the decision-making agency of children.
If there's a problem with RMS, it's that he's too autistic to understand that some topics are too radioactive to write about, and that he makes very nuanced arguments that are vulnerable to misrepresentation by people with agendas.
The Linux Kernel is actually hierarchical by design. Anyone can submit a patch, but it then has to go up the maintainer chain to Linus' final approval before landing mainline, but of course Linus doesn't review everything himself and implicitly trusts his maintainers.
So part of the Rust drama a few months ago was accusations that despite the stated goal of rustifying some subsystems, the existing hierarchy is sometimes acting in bad faith and unwilling to learn the basics of Rust to talk ABI or generally accommodate the reasonable needs of Rust devs. Asahi Lina had an impressive writeup of her Rust contributions to the Apple Silicon GPU driver and the frequent, demotivating difficulties she had with maintainers refusing to learn anything that isn't C or to acknowledge errors like race conditions in their C code. Some insanely talented people are being kept at arm's length by the kernel community over petty turf wars that look very much like a symptom of institutional rot. Which isn't very surprising to me having met some unrelated but very highly opinionated (and sometimes very confidently incorrect) greybeards of similar ilk.
I don't have a horse in that race or a solution to the kernel issues, but it's interesting to watch how at scale even kernel OSS devs fall into the same trappings as any institution with a hierarchy. We're all just human, and even when working for an organization with the most noble of goals we must keep an eye out for hierarchies and institutions and rules and processes.