News provied two services in the old days: access and filtering.
Back in the day you couldn't easily get things straight from the horses mouth, now you can just go to their website.
If you did have direct access in the old days, it was all way too much. There was no way to filter to 10-minutes worth of top goings on. Now a days you can just look at what is upvoted and stop once you have read enough.
I stopped caring about what was happening on the world stage in 2022, and it has been sublime. I hear about the big things from friends and random folks, and it gives some instant conversation starters (“oh no, I hadn’t heard about that”). The only news I actually care about is local news, and I skim the newsletter my (small) city publishes on Fridays.
Given that, there is zero value provided to me by traditional media publishers. I say this as someone who gets NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and FT for free through work. I don’t use them, because I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
No judgement here though—if reading the paper is your thing and you like staying informed, that’s great and I fully support it. Just offering my perspective.
Add to this the introduction of terrible news media. The spam and click bait media, where you get the articles for free but the articles you get are basically worse than what you’d find anywhere else because they are most there to generate revenue from advertising. Stuff that gives “traditional” news media a very bad image. Further add the media platforms which are now straight up political propaganda, which some always where, but now they are owned by very few people and push very divisive agendas which is a little different from the past where they were more inline with each other and the “general” aristocracy rather than a few billionaires/oligarchs and you gain the general media perception even more. Both are rightfully so.
In a sense you get what you pay for though. If you’re not paying you’re not getting quality news. You can see this in Danish news very clearly, where only a handful of news papers still do actual critical journalism and the rest mainly do opinions or click-bait articles on current events that you might as well read on Facebook. Not because Facebook does anything particularly in that department but because the contractors who sell stories and pictures to the “free” news media typically also post their content elsewhere for increased revenue on their part.
As far as going to the “biggest” most “cultural” news media I totally agree with you. In my country people read Weekend Avisen, and then add one of the more politically inclined subscription papers based on their views. But basically it boils down to thee papers, one that is slightly more conservative (which in Scandinavian/American optics would make it almost socialist), one that is left-leaning (again, very socialist in American optics) and one that is based on Christianity (but extremely moderate, as in pro abortion and gay marriage).
Aside from that there are two “localised” papers which either focus heavily on Copenhagen or the part of our country which is called Jylland.
Almost none of these papers would be alive without government subsidies. Because the only two papers which actually makes money are Weekendavisen (our NYT) and the Christian paper which doesn’t actually make money but is subsidised by various Christian groups.
I mean, seriously, that's the reason.
Back when newspapers were healthy, basically there was all this stuff that was bundled with the actual news that was of more immediate utility to people: classifieds, movie reviews, comics, coupons. And there was less competition for people's leisure time.
News is now in a very competitive leisure time landscape and is debundled from stuff that's of high value, and most people just don't care that much about news. They'll read it when it's around but they won't pay for it. The ones who are willing to pay for it mostly just subscribe to the New York Times because in a nationalized news environment why not go for the biggest producer.