I think the reason for the shutdown of the service is that the price customers are actually willing to pay for news has decreased a lot since the web took over it. Nowadays there are so many free or cheap ways to get informed online that paying tens of dollars a month to subscribe to one or two newspapers seems relative expensive.
That's why successful outlets like The Economist put so much emphasis into convincing potential customers that accurate information is valuable. It sure is, but people have to be constantly reminded of it.
Deep down people value both entertainment and being informed. The issue is if someone isn't thinking the two look the same, especially if the enticing title is something you already believe. Clickbait journalism is just yellow journalism 2.0. We need desperately need some laws to setup some basic guardrails on what can be called and marketed as journalism or news.
Reader's price expectations had already dropped to $0.00/month before the Kindle newsstand launched.
The newspapers had already set the price to free for about 10-15 years before Amazon launched the Kindle newsstand.
The newspapers for the most part have still never made the online quality as good as the print copy too.
People cannot discount that these papers all put up free editions on the web for a long time and didn't realize the damage till the print subscriptions tanked.
I think not enough is made of the damage caused by aggregators. And I don't just mean like reddit I mean things like The Hill or Huff Po that pay for subscriptions to original reporting and then digest everything they write with a clickbait headline and leech all the ad dollars away from the people who did the hard work.
That's why successful outlets like The Economist put so much emphasis into convincing potential customers that accurate information is valuable. It sure is, but people have to be constantly reminded of it.