As far as I remember things, newspapers used to carry a lot of advertising. And the face value of a newspaper was more-or-less a nominal amount, I suspect largely to support the distribution network.

I don't recall ever seeing a newspaper lying around with ads cut out or scribbled over - which I guess is a simplistic analog of the ad-blockers and such that modern news outlets are up against. You can understand the push to maintain revenue that's needed to support quality journalism.

At the same time, as a consumer of news, print ads would not be centrally and intrusively tracking your every thought either, so the desire to block modern ads is entirely rational.

Modern advertising methods have broken the social contract that used to exist to help keep things in balance.