Yeah; and they were generally extremely high quality.

40 years ago maybe. Now it's written to a 5th grade level and bloated with explain like I'm five filler.

Major US newspapers in the 21st century did. But regardless, many of them were opaque in nature. "Via AP" may check the box of attribution but is lost on a reader of average literacy.

Newswires were well understood entities for all newspaper readers for more than 100 years.

That’s giving an awful lot of credit to “all newspaper readers” there.

Certainly as a kid/teen, I didn’t understand it; I suspect plenty of adults didn’t either.

This was not used to commingle authority vs the stories they reported themselves, and is in no way comparable to what cnn is doing, ie leveraging their site rank to juice traffic to trash content for ad dollars.