Exactly, that's the thing people keep missing in these discussions. That $0.25 for your newsstand paper didn't pay for the costs of paying reporters and journalists; it really only paid for distribution and maybe printing costs (e.g., a lot of that quarter went to the local newsstand, not the newspaper). These days, distribution costs are pretty close to zero since they don't need printing presses, trucks to drive papers around, newsstands, and all the people to staff this machinery. They do need IT personnel and some servers, but the per-viewer cost there is much less. Newspapers got the bulk of their funding from advertising back then, so readers' expectations haven't really changed that much, the newspapers have simply gotten much worse at funding themselves with ads.