I thought it was more to do with the type of person that read papers more than any price signal. If I were to generalize my experience with people reading paper

I thought it was more to do with the type of person that read papers more than any price signal. If I were to generalize my experience with people reading papers it's that the poorest 20% of society never read them, the next 20% read the Sunday paper, the next 20% read it daily and the 20% after that read something like the economist. Through self selection advertisers could target their audiences somewhat. Of course those are extremely broad generalizations.