It is true in a historical sense.

People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue.

This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here).

On top of that the ad revenue is extremely 'diluted'. Putting an ad in a print newspaper was expensive!.

For an organization who get their main income from ads, tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it.

The subscriptions barely paid for delivery.

>For an organization who get their main income from ads

The NYT makes about $2B per year from subscriber revenue. They make about $450M from digital ads over all properties. Obviously not all news orgs are the same, but the lead example of a shitty experience is the NYT, so weird that all of the rationalizations work so hard to diverge.

>tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it

"Tailoring" a digital page to not include ads for subscribers is so laughably trivial that this is a farcical claim. They aren't hand-laying out the content and removing ad upsets it or something. But they don't remove the ads because, gollum style, why shouldn't they force ads on me?

What we're talking about is classic enshittification, and every justification people make up is just cope. Indeed, the fact that I'm a subscriber makes me even more lucrative to advertisers, in a classic catch-22 that completely undoes all of the "just pay and you don't get ads in my invented scenario".