For most of the 20th century, mass media worked in generally the same way. You had large daily newspapers that covered local, and sometimes national and international, news. And you had magazines, which were weekly or monthly publications that covered usually a specific topic or general area of interest. There were other bits—wire services that covered basically everything and contributed content that the newspapers and sometimes the magazines would all use, and of course TV news, which became its own insane thing that I’m mostly going to ignore for this particular blog—but that’s generally how people got information about the world for like a hundred years.
Then the internet happened. All these physical publications and even the broadcasting ones had to have websites. For a decade or two this was pretty much fine, too; there were boom and bust cycles as publishers figured out they could get ad money when a lot of people clicked their stuff and then watched as Google and Facebook stepped in and took all that ad money away for themselves. After this nobody really had any idea what to do and publications started to die. A lot of the online ones died first; now the print ones are going extinct too.
There are many aspects to this—private equity strip-mining previously profitable local chains, evil right-wing conglomerates consolidating publications and using that as an excuse to do the same kind of strip-mining the private equity guys are doing, et cetera. I’ve written literally dozens of blogs about all this stuff over my career and will probably keep writing them for the next decade or more.