4 ms·

Back then there weren't so many worthless garbage news sites. So the reporter most likely worked for a real newspaper that printed and sold the thing.

• jsnell 11y ago
  Those "real" newspapers only existed due to the "creepy" ads that you hate. IIRC we're talking like a third of the revenue coming from ads a decade ago. There are few newspapers in the world that would be economically viable with just subscription revenue, now or then. If advertising dies as business model, it won't be just the Buzzfeeds of the world that go with it. Of course nobody can force you to watch ads. But the people you're hurting by doing that are in fact the same people making the content you're actually viewing. Your glee about killing just the low quality content providers by blocking ads isn't justified.
• acdha 11y ago
  As jsnell pointed out, newspapers sold tons of ads – and the reason we had so much more resource-intensive journalism back then was because you bought the entire newspaper and so the classified ads, car dealers, etc. were subsidizing the Podunk Herald-Clarion's international reporters. Further, your description of the past is either limited to a few months in 1994 or needs to include the tons of small “portal” sites which were plastered with ads and ran only content from AP and Reuters or, more likely, lower-tier networks but produced no original content except for advertorial sponsored content. The click-bait headline might have taken awhile to reach its modern form but it was invented shortly after the invention of advertising.