I work for the company from whom the the i was bought, our office in Sheffield didn't have much to do with the paper but we occasionally covered things when people from the London office were unavailable. Reach were originally interested in the i but they pulled out. The email we received to tell us the news mentioned that nothing would change staff-wise and it would be business as usual - for now.
We were hanging on by a thread before the sale so now we're just quietly waiting for the rest of our titles to be sold off, dissolved, consolidated or combinations of these.
There are several of our local titles which may be of some value to other companies but a lot of them are piddly little community things that not many people would miss. In the past few years many of the reporters were made redundant, local offices closed and centralised hubs were created instead - this had the effect of cheapening the titles which all ended up as identically templated and full of content ripped from social media and generic filler to pad things out.