I think what the "legacy" news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting. I regularly get the impression a certain slice of HN commenters think "the media" is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive "an agenda". In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. Three senior reporters working on a Pulitzer-level story can take years, numerous support staff, and legal fees.
Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing etc. Yet, when it comes to capturing news stories of equivalent production effort, "information wants to be free". I think that may largely be a failure to understand the work that real reporting takes.
Ironically, as prestige newsrooms have shrunk, the percentage of high-quality stories has gone down because revenue has declined and those stories are expensive. So in fact we do perversely end up with more click-bait as Google et al engineered systems to optimize for attention and click-through (the opposite of a multi-part investigation).
Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing etc. Yet, when it comes to capturing news stories of equivalent production effort, "information wants to be free". I think that may largely be a failure to understand the work that real reporting takes.
Ironically, as prestige newsrooms have shrunk, the percentage of high-quality stories has gone down because revenue has declined and those stories are expensive. So in fact we do perversely end up with more click-bait as Google et al engineered systems to optimize for attention and click-through (the opposite of a multi-part investigation).