It's just a bait and switch. These journalists want all the benefits of the web: free indexing and archiving, free global distribution and rendering, virtual word-of-mouth advertising; a huge and easy revenue generation model. Their production and design costs are nothing compared to two decades ago. They don't own printing presses. The internet pretty much bends over backwards to throw traffic at them, and on top of that, they rip the rug out under your feet as soon as you land there! Like you can't even read the words that they wrote unless you agree to more bother, and they've already made a few cents off you just from the ads that were served! And to boot, the whole show shoved megabytes of crap in your face, which actually costs you money, and they follow you around the internet like an unimaginable creep.
It's like they feel entitled to all this free stuff and the one thing they offer of value they pull back at the last second. Shitty.