Generally when demand for a stock increases, the price goes up. When demand drops, so does the price. News stories about major changes in stock values should address the apparent causes. The latter is the total profit amount divided by the number of shares of company stock currently owned. This is the price of a share of stock divided by the company's earnings per share for the most recent 12 months.
Many companies regularly pay money to their stockholders.
These payments are called dividends, and they usually are made in quarterly installments. Usually the dividend is a portion of the earnings per share, but if a company has no profit during a given period, it might be able to use earnings retained from prior profitable periods to pay its current dividend. For a variety of reasons, some companies do not pay dividends or do not pay them during certain periods of the company's development. Dividends typically are a few dollars per share per quarter. If you edit a story that refers to dividends of several hundred dollars per share, that should prompt you to raise questions with the reporter.