This is a business play in the hopes two sinking ships can stay afloat better as one. The question is how soon will they rip the bandaid off and stop printing? it's a huge expense, yet there still is a lot of print ad revenue out there (esp locally). So a catch 22. There will DEF be cost cutting measures.
These old school publishers never thought the internet was going to really disrupt a 100+ yr old lucrative business and never made forward thinking M&A moves...Whoops!
As of today, Twitter is worth about 30x that of Gannett in market cap. And with the right, aggressive offer a decade ago a big pub could have probably acquired TWTR.
Here is your factoid for the day: in late 2006, Google acquired youtube for $1.65B...Today, over 5B videos are watched daily on YT with 80% of the audience being under 49. Cha Ching.