It's because the executives don't trust the journalists to do the work properly.
The article says that explicitly: customers have complained about the quality of the work. The business owners view unhappy customers as a threat to their business, and so have introduced automation to make product quality higher and more even. The workers are unhappy because they don't want to be automated away and resent the implication that their artisanally hand-crafted articles aren't good enough. This is a very old story that's been going on for hundreds of years. There's nothing special about it.
The article says that explicitly: customers have complained about the quality of the work. The business owners view unhappy customers as a threat to their business, and so have introduced automation to make product quality higher and more even. The workers are unhappy because they don't want to be automated away and resent the implication that their artisanally hand-crafted articles aren't good enough. This is a very old story that's been going on for hundreds of years. There's nothing special about it.