Building an audience is not distribution. That's a separate service. Distribution is, by definition, just shuffling bits from point A to point B. This was for the longest time the single most valuable product the publishers offered both to consumers AND to journalists (most people seem to ignore that employers are required to provide a service to their employees in order to be able to obtain their services at a rate low enough that they can profit from it).

Building an audience is now handled by search engines and somewhat by marketing services... marketing services operate on a flat rate, not taking royalties let alone the 90%+ cut publishers want, and the sheer scale and reach of the Internet makes building an audience not terribly difficult. In addition, a MUCH smaller audience is necessary to support a single journalist than to support a large inefficient corporate publisher. Whereas you needed millions of readers to stay afloat, now far fewer are necessary and niche markets are entirely exploitable by individuals.

I think a better way of saying it is that distribution is a commodity. It is easy and painless to distribute newspaper-style information these days compared to 100 years ago. Not to say there aren't ways to make money - look at Newsstand for example.

The distribution market is very unevenly commodified. Hence, Apple is able to take a 30% cut of The Magazine's gross, in return for distributing it.