News only made money when the newspapers could leverage their circulation numbers to run their own ads network. The classifieds section was a money machine. I remember full-page ads in the Washington Post from local car dealerships showing every model they were selling. They likely ran different ads for distribution in other regions, probably 10Xing their money. Google and Facebook killed that.

What Bezos bought was a corpse of a business, but one with strong journalistic credibility known for historic investigative analyses such as the Watergate cover-up that earned public goodwill. He was buying that goodwill and slowly asphyxiating it to align with his own interests.