It depends on which newspapers you are talking about, but what I said was that newspapers should not have tried to replace subscription fees with ads, because s

It depends on which newspapers you are talking about, but what I said was that newspapers should not have tried to replace subscription fees with ads, because subscription fees were never trivial and were always needed for serious newspapers to be profitable. There is also the issue of online ads generating far less revenue than their print counterparts, and the fact that newspaper ads include the formerly profitable classifieds section which now has to compete with things like Craigslist.