Uber, Google and others pay London Evening Standard for favorable coverage
Whoever is paying for the newspaper owns the content. The readers aren't paying, the editors aren't paying, but the advertisers are. If any free or heavily ad-subsidised paper publishes negative content about one of their advertising partners, guess what happens? The contract gets pulled and a major revenue stream disappears, so if you're an editor of a free paper, you don't do that.There is very little integrity in a free paper, it's basically a propaganda leaflet handed out by large organizations to influence your behaviour, with a few crosswords in the back.