Most editors have little understanding of how to attract and keep readers. Editors could create the papers they wanted and the readers be damned. I would add that many still act in the same way. If few publishers use research to discover the needs and desires of their community, in spite of a lot of rhetoric and lip-service not many of them are as close to their readers and their community as they would like to think. There is also a noticeable lack of strategies for reacting to the needs and desires of readers which have been identified.
Some editors do make an effort.
But more typical is another editor in provincial Moldova, who quizzed myself and another consultant on how to raise her circulation, but had never considered asking her readers for their ideas.