That's overly simplistic, in this case. You're not going to sell more buggies by making the quality of your buggy worse, true. But you're _also_ not going to sell more buggies, period, if everybody is preferring cars.

Likewise - publishers know that cuts aren't going to make their magazines more compelling - but it's 1) cut somewhere or 2) go out of business faster. You might manage to survive by maintaining quality and even adding things if the audience is large enough and you can pull from competing publications. (Although, in some cases, the cuts are things readers don't see -- e.g., allowing advertisers to place contributed content, or ensuring you don't publish anything that upsets the remaining advertisers...)

>That's overly simplistic, in this case.

I'm not making an argument, just paraphrasing from the article.

on edit: >or ensuring you don't publish anything that upsets the remaining advertisers

I think most definitions of journalistic quality would argue this is a decrease in quality.

I think that's fair. To the degree that someone, somehow, is willing and able to foot the bills, lots of people are willing and able to work hard to put out a quality product. Yes, some have an agenda to push that you may or may not agree with, but a lot of the issue is money at the end of the day.