It's not blocked here in Taiwan. I wonder if they're blocking it because of the GDPR?
This is the natural reaction when random parts of the world decide to try to regulate what sorts of sites you’re allowed to put on the internet.
A third of the 100 most viewed US newspapers have shuttered themselves to the EU, however this mass blocking has not seemingly been the norm for newspapers or other businesses in other markets outside the EU, or noticeably stopped any businesses within it from running websites.
What makes US news media companies so fragile when faced with this particular piece of EU legislation, compared to everyone else in the world, that they would rather chuck away eyeballs for their advertisers than deal with it?
Of course people within the EU will continue to run websites under GDPR, they have no choice. Further, the reality is that enforcement will be squarely focused on importing cash from mid-to-large sized foreign companies. The anti-competitive goals of GDPR will not be achieved by fining EU companies to death - they'll be achieved by hobbling foreign competitors.
As for companies in other industries, I suspect that you're noticing a large number of US newspaper sites are blocking because they have a larger contingent of international visitors than most US sites do, and each one of those visitors could subject them to the enormous, arbitrary penalties included in the GDPR. Massive companies like Facebook and Google can afford to comply and deal with the numerous legal uncertainties associated with it (and have to because they receive a large percentage of their traffic from the EU). But for mid-tier media companies, compliance is an enormous expense, yet they are large enough that they would be an enforcement target. So they did the financially responsible thing: block the EU.
Finally, most smaller websites won't bother with blocking or complying, because they believe they will not be enforcement targets. This may or may not be the correct position to take; only time will tell.