Hypothesis: It turned out that a lot of people did not want to pay for news. They wanted to pay for entertainment. Newspapers had a distribution monopoly, and chose what the users wanted to receive.

Now that the monopoly is broken, other parties are providing services give for free. It turns out that many users are happy with those services.

Some users wanted news enough to pay for it. Those users now pay subscriptions.

However, the old news was subsidised by the users who just wanted entertainment. The new news is paid for by a smaller group. They must either pay more, or accept less news.

I pay for financial news. There is no other news I would be prepared to pay for. I am not prepared to pay for entertainment, except the cinema and overpriced popcorn.