I saw this article linked from a YouTube comment on a video by Ron Pratt, owner of the towing company who did the recovery. I was struck by the lack of ads, click bait referral links, etc. Because the website is not overrun by crap, they can feature full size pictures. Then I realized, why couldn't all local news websites be more like this?

Mostly because they're all desperately trying to figure out how to stay in business. The local paper I used to work for in the '06ish era had a pretty large presence downtown in their own dedicated building that had been around since at least the 60s. That location employed around 150-200ish people for all functions - maintenance, ad sales, IT, HR, management, reporters, photographers, copyeditors, designers, etc.

They had a second location on the edge of town for the presses - we ran two presses and that employed another 60-80 people.

They now rent half of the third floor of an office building, and friends say that feels too big. They employ a total of about two dozen people now. Everything that can be outsourced - including printing, copyediting, and design - has been.

Local news is in very, very bad shape right now.

Yes, perhaps a remote workforce working from the cloud and charging for full articles/full-size images could bring them into the black.

... that's a gallery of photos with captions. Not exactly an article.

As for the website itself, I have hit a popup on my first three navigation. Then I got hit by a paywall.

That website looks pretty bad. Cato Institute is an example of newspaper/magazine on the web done well

https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/fiscal-policy-...

It looks like a, erm, website. What am I supposed to be seeing here?

White on black text? No, thanks.