What would you prefer them to do?

- There are plenty of good reasons against using the typical ad platforms, and the increasing adoption of ad blockers shows that users don't like them

- Hosting your own ads is hard in the internet and doesn't seem very profitable

- Running the website as a marketing expense to increase sales of the paper version used to work, but now people just stay on the website

- Microdonation platforms like flattr fail to gain any traction

Unless you somehow find good journalists that work for free a model of allowing X article reads per month before requiring payment seems like the best model available.