They're slow, old news. You pay for it and it still contains ads. Even the news on TV and radio was slower than the internet and also contained ads (we pay for public broadcasting / non-profit via taxation).
Only later on I realized in a world with limited time smarter folks read newspapers not for news but for interpretation. That doesn't have to be on same day as the news since it is an in-depth, well though, unique expert proposition (of course there is also pulp). Which was the USP the salesman was arguing.
How did it turn out? Internet became a world of tracking and advertising, the EU fought back with law.
And I just never liked the feel of newspapers because they're so large and thin it is hard to switch pages. I ended up damaging pages. Especially outside in the wind. Maybe the tabloid format (the status quo nowadays?) suffers less from it. But then again I am an e-reader person. A newspaper you can forget/lose/damage though, an e-reader or smartphone not so much.
I couldn't get into audiobooks (I miss too much / zone out) which saddens me. Because in-depth podcasts are definitely a guilty pleasure.
smarter people who have never heard of gill-mann amnesia?
The browsability of a newspaper is hard to beat. I can discover news and info far easier than reading the paper on my phone.
Also, when reading the paper, I'm not constantly tempted to flip between different items (email, todos, other sites) so it feels more cohesive to me.
The Atlantic, however, was ridiculously affordable. I had a subscription by the time I was in my early 20s for, IIRC, about $14 a year. Might have even been $14 for two years.