alt Hacker NewsNah, it's earlier than that. The move to online, plumetting paper ad-sales, and the online expectation that you could access all the articles for free (and ad-block) (oh hey look above the comment with archive.is to bypass the NewYorker's paywall) is what killed The News.
Sure you can say consumers refusing the ad-ridden paywalled experience killed it, or we could say the lack of adaptation and finding better business models did. I think a lot of players killed themselves off fighting to preserve rather than adapt, or worse have digital content subsidize analog (to this day I keep running into ebooks that cost more than the physical books, and they wonder why people pirate)