Most serious news organisations now charge for access after a decade of giving it away. The reversal followed the collapse of the advertising model that made free publishing viable.
Print advertising subsidised more than readers realised
A printed newspaper earned from display advertising and classifieds, and the cover price frequently covered little more than the cost of paper and delivery.
Classifieds in particular were extremely profitable because the publisher held a local monopoly on the only practical way to reach nearby buyers.
Dedicated online marketplaces removed that monopoly entirely, and the revenue did not migrate to news websites but left the sector.
Digital advertising pays far less for the same attention
Online inventory is effectively unlimited, and unlimited supply meets steady demand at a low price, so a page view earns a fraction of what a page did.
Targeting made the situation worse for publishers rather than better, because advertisers could buy the audience wherever it appeared rather than paying a premium for the context.
Intermediaries in the automated buying chain also take a share, so the amount reaching the publisher is smaller than what the advertiser spent.
Traffic from platforms turned out to be borrowed
Publishers built audiences through search and social distribution, optimising heavily for referral traffic that arrived without any direct relationship with the reader.
Those platforms changed their ranking and feed decisions repeatedly, and traffic that had been treated as a foundation proved to be a policy setting.
A reader who arrives from a feed, reads one article and leaves cannot be sold a subscription, and is worth very little in advertising terms either.
The paywall changes what gets published
Advertising rewards volume and breadth, since every additional page is another opportunity to show an advert to somebody.
Subscriptions reward depth and distinctiveness, because a reader pays for what they cannot get elsewhere rather than for coverage available everywhere.
That has pushed successful publishers towards investigation, specialist expertise and analysis, and away from aggregating stories other outlets already ran.
The model does not fit every publication
Charging works best where a title has a national or specialist audience willing to pay for something specific and hard to replicate.
Local newspapers face the same cost base with a much smaller potential subscriber pool, and the reporting they do is expensive relative to that pool.
Which is why the shift has stabilised some national mastheads while local coverage has continued to contract, despite both making the same commercial move.