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Probably because people actually paid for media at the time?

Nope. For newspapers, at least, this accounted for maybe 20% of revenue.

The remainder was ads and classifieds.

Everybody is in trouble.

But people paying for a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing it, and even then, plenty were taking losses on the cover price.

The newspaper was the primary way to get ads into the home. Each city paper had a Google-like position in that city's ad market.

Quality could be higher because ad reach was based in part on subscriber count, not just the attention-grabby-ness of particular headlines.