I can understand why a newspaper whose subscriber base is in southern California would not want to spend the time and money necessary to comply with European privacy regulations. It's unlikely that the benefits for the business would outweigh the costs.
The only thing gdpr really changed was the size of the fine...
Why should they even bother spending resources understanding those regulations?
The decision is pretty straightforward for them. Don't like it? Go complain with the regulators.
Nah, people whinning on hackernews is pretty much irrelevant.
On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal networking costs (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership.
The LA Times makes money from subscriptions. How many EU citizens do you think would purchase LA Times subscriptions if the site complied with the GDPR?
If webmasters in Europe stop linking to you, Americans traveling in EU lose your trust, and EU-hosted search engine crawlers figure you don't exist, then you start to have some problems.
A good businessman is able to change its assumptions when the world around him changes. In 1980, it might have made sense to limit your newspaper audience in the area where you lived. In 2010+, due to the Internet, the main cost of a newspaper consists in the work performed by the writer to produce the actual content. When the world around you gives you basically free infrastructure to send those bytes to another continent against a one-time investment of assessing and fixing your site for compliance, you just don't say no.
As an addition to the GP's argument, consider that these days, news stories are meant to be linked to on social media. People have friends and audiences in many places in the world. If someone with parts of their audience in Europe wants to share a news story, will they choose an article on GDPR-blocking site, or on a GDPR-compliant one?
The most important factor is still if your newspaper is any good.
The EU cares.
To rephrase: if you produce an asset that can be shared with an additional significant audience at a fraction of its production cost, and all you need to do is a one-time compliance cost that probably will soon become mandatory for your primary area of distribution, then how can it be a good practice to continue banning your customer-base based on what continent are they in the world?
You can't have the cake and eat it too. You can't pass regulations and then complain people don't want to do business with you.
Any one-time cost can be amortized in time by recurring revenues, after which you're left with pure profit.
Technical work (manage your reader's cookie and policy preferences etc) is a one-time cost. Revenue from EU readers is an ongoing benefit. Hence, as long as EU income is greater than its traffic serving costs, you're bound to come ahead after some amortization time.
2. There are other ongoing costs to comply with gdpr outside of the server fees such as manpower to comply with gdpr requests, lawyer fees if they get sued and obviously fines if they lose any lawsuit related to it.