Google killed journalism years ago. It was once a well compensated, high prestige job with nice perks. The recruits should get the money while they can.
I've been very disappointed by the MSM over the last 15 years, but I think a good portion of this disappointment can be attributed to the talent pool drying up.
How was this Google's fault? The internet killed journalism as a respected career path. People went to the online version instead of the printed version. The subscription numbers cratered. The money used to pay journos plummeted. The stock price became more important as news orgs were all bought up by < 5 corporate owners. Since everyone was now working for the same bosses, their jobs became redundant by someone else and jobs were slashed in deference to the stock prices. Experience journos were replaced by greenhorns that only know how to interview Twitt...er, X and not actually able to interview subjects. Consumers bolted even faster.
I remember reading news papers in the 1980s and 1990s. Basically they were a mix of actual news articles (typically copied verbatim from agencies like AP, Reuters, and national equivalents), some original reporting from their own journalists, and a lot of filler content, opinion pieces, cartoons, etc. With lots of ads.
The original reporting and opinions was why you bought a news paper. The actual news would be stale by the time it hit your doorstep but it still had some value because news spread slowly.
As soon as news started being distributed online in more or less real time, the shelf life of news articles reduced to zero. And since that stuff is basically being tweeted out in a gazillion different ways, the value dropped to zero as well.
That also affected original content. Because the second that's published, people will extract the essential facts and write about that online. The whole point of original reporting was that it was exclusive to the publisher for long enough that readers had no choice to get the information in a timely fashion by buying the paper. That time window went away. As soon as you publish something, the essentials are being reported on by world + dog. In a matter of seconds. You can be well informed without ever buying paying for a news paper.
So that left news papers in a place where they were basically distributing old news with low value bundled up with some filler content. The filler content could go on a blog or in a magazine just as easily. And a lot of it did not have a terribly large audience to begin with. Most people didn't have time to read news papers cover to cover.
Google helped accelerate this process but they did not cause it.
There's no reason that the classified ad revenue needed to use the false promise of targeted ad sales through 3rd party companies vs just moving the existing customers to digital ads as a first party basis just like how they did with print.
I've been very disappointed by the MSM over the last 15 years, but I think a good portion of this disappointment can be attributed to the talent pool drying up.