How many of those newspapers are "skins", hollow shells that layer a newspaper shape (printed or virtual) over generic content with minimal human curation or editing?

I don't know the answer, but I'm confident it's non-zero, and probably higher that whatever my initial guess might be.

There is but it’s a brutal dying business. Our little paper had like 20 reporters in the mid 90s.

Now like 5, who also do editorial, and make peanuts.