Realistically all these papers cant afford to do proper journalism anymore because no-one is buying them. Just like news websites, they've rapidly learned that what gets people clicking is clickbait titles that don't giveaway the article reveal like "New Store set to open at Teesside Park" - people will click it out of interest but if you put "Charity shop becomes latest Teesside Park store to open", you can guarantee less people will click it because they've already revealed the story. Buzzfeed capitalised on this massively and everyone basically had to follow suit.
Wouldn't be surprised if the gazette stopped doing it's print edition soon, only 12000 copies on average are sold of each issue.For context in 2013 they sold 35000, in 2012 38,000. The company that tracks circulation shows a 10% fall this year during lockdown on the same period to last year. Do they even still have the rough as you like sellers in town like they used to with the blue crates? Used to be you'd get several editions during the day with updated headlines, and I remember the jobs section used to be the go-to place and used to have loads in, likewise the property sales and for sale section. Nowadays everything is online so a lot of the needs that the paper used to fulfil just aren't there anymore. Journalism suffers as a result and as Reach owns many of these regional papers, they can crossover news stories easily which is why we get so many stories on the outskirts of teesside, and why we always have the view from the opposition type stories when we play a team, and theres only so many times you can push out a "remember when" edition.
Lot of the stories get recycled like clockwork, and you can guarantee they will have metrics that shows which articles are the most popular and diarise rehashing them regularly (the most popular seems to be any kind of "here's 20 photos between from a 35 year period in <random venue>- are you in one of them?" as they wheel them out constantly.