This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But when you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to complaining about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing what they want.
My experience and reasons for not paying anymore are similar. Used to pay for The Guardian for some time, but when they started pestering me about a subscription renewal the whole thing felt a lot less classy. Now it suddenly was about me and not news anymore.
Me too: never again. I would pay for anonymous vouchers or similar where I'm not identifiable to the newspaper, though.
Don't write code, don't talk to users?
There's also just too much news these days and most of it isn't important. It's saturated. Maybe if we cut down on the number of media outlets. You used to just buy 1-2 newspapers at most but the equivalent now is likely 5-10. And each 1 would be 2x as thick.