> If you actually paid for your news, all these problems would go away.

We all did. They were called magazines, and you paid for subscriptions. There were gaming magazines, tech magazines, music and TV magazines, celebrity gossip magazines, etc. Most of them had many of the same issues as modern sites for those topics.

That’s because the subscription basically paid for mailing you a paper copy. Everything else was still covered by advertising.

Some magazines but certainly not all. The publisher I worked for most recently had three sister titles: one entirely ad-funded, another entirely subscription-funded (no ads at all), the third (which I edited) half and half.