Your comment makes no sense. The companies that are upending old media, Facebook and Google, also have an ads-driven model. Youtube is ads-driven. Even Spotify runs ads if you aren't a subscriber. And Joe Rogan has sponsors.
In the past, this model had value and individuals like A.M. Rosenthal made a point of carefully curating the individuals that were hired to publish in the NY Times. It's become increasingly clear that as news organizations have faced declining revenue, they've begun to compromise on this curation. The fallout from this starts small and people continue to consider content from the NY Times to have some mark of quality, but eventually it will reach the point where those with integrity will realize that the tools for them to go it alone are out there and they are better off not associating with the individuals the NY Times has hired that do not meeting the historical bar for integrity it once had.
It's not so much that subscription news is dying at the hands of new sources of information, but that it is committing reputational suicide in response to disruptive innovation that allows individuals with integrity to stand on their own.