> the ads are well done and blend in with the webpage

That's called "native advertisement" and it's supposed to trick you into thinking you're reading a genuine article instead of an ad. I actively avoid sites that do this.

> In fact people used to sift through the Sunday NYT simply for the ads.

Back when people couldn't google for stuff, and the ads were useful because they mostly came from local businesses you actually needed once in a while.

There is no such thing as "the ads are well done and blend in with the webpage". Especially on a website where you pay for a subscription.

Moreover, there is a tipping point, beyond which the ad blends too well and becomes plain deception. This is even more of a problem for journalistic publications. See also: native advertising.

Indeed. In print, you had dedicated pages to advertisement. Not optimal, but much easier to ignore. Nowadays, you never know if an “article” is simply a marketing agenda.

Yes because the signs people put around the "native ads" literally stating that it's an "ad" or "sponsored content" are easily ignorable. Get real. People pay for a newspaper with ads in it. You still have to sift through it. Ignore it? You literally have to turn the page or spend 5 minutes pulling the ads out of the newspaper if you don't want them and in some cases there isn't a way to escape the ad with print because part of the article is there with the ad. Ad block won't save you then.

That's no different from paying for a real newspaper subscription though.

But I guess you could say that you are paying for delivery instead.

Tbh they could email me articles plaintext and I'd happily hand over my money.

Imagine that, a digital newspaper in your digital mailbox!

You mean sending you news in a digital letter?

How intriguing! I would like to subscribe to your... how do you say... letter of news.

but a letter of news may be too small, maybe we can remove that size constraint and call it 'a paper of news' that would be delivered

Maybe they could send multiple letters and I could have some kind of client that shows me the headlines and allows me to open the articles I'm interested in.

That would be amazing. How come Google hasn't invented something like that yet?

Over 20 years ago, the San Jose Mercury-News offered exactly such a service.

Called Newshound, it let you set up to face sets of keywords (in the basic $5/month subscription), and it would email you the plain text of every article that matched the criteria, whether generated within the publisher network or from wire services.

It would be trivial to write a script to scrape text.npr.org and send it to you.

Or you can just visit it, I suppose.

Firefox and Safari each have a 'Reader Mode' which does exactly what you want: presenting a web-page in the absence of any web design.

It's really the ultimate condemnation of modern web design that this feature is so useful.

Edit: won't help the data-consumption though, as I believe it can only be enabled after the page has loaded

In reply to your edit. You can use something like umatrix to block almost everything (even css) and reader mode will still work, I do this for most newspapers and works quite well.

we used to have usenet...

And when I first got online in the early 90's, my ISP had an additional subscription option to get real newspaper-type articles delivered in a special usenet newsgroup hierarchy (can't remember the name of the news service itself though).

What do you mean "used to"? Usenet still exists.

And how good is it?

Like any community, that's defined by the people in it. Some groups are excellent, some groups are mostly dead, some display varying levels of toxicity. Overall my experience hasn't been a bad one.

What kinds of groups are there?

Given the lack of popularity and commercial support, combined with the complexity to connect a client with an available server (compared with downloading an app from the store), I'd expect that they are populated mostly by old tech people or passers-by from universities; and any special interest group would have small user base coming from that demographic profile. Are my assumptions correct?

Reader Mode, my friend.