Gannett is the parent company; they own USA Today and dozens of local papers. I worked at a Gannett paper for a few years, at the time, we had a corporate-managed templating system but were able to make fairly significant modifications to it. That eventually transitioned to the one-size-fits-all approach you see today.

Same's happening to the physical product; mostly a thin wrapper around state/national news from Gannett corporate.

Well that's upsetting. My local paper has been owned by Advance Publications since the 40s, but it doesn't seem to suffer the same quality issues. It's even won several major awards, both for individual journalism and for the publication as a whole :)

I almost wish they would pick up a template website though, because theirs is super buggy (I'd likely get the print version anyway).