"The price is usually given in CPM (cost per mille - cost per thousand impressions), so if an ad has a cpm of 10$, one single impression is worth 0.01$ ! (The average cpm, at the time of writing, is around 1$ if you were asking)."

This is the fundamental core of why journalism never made the jump from newspapers to the internet, and why we have the absolute cesspool of clickbait and seo-chum of a 'news media' that we do now.

Its got nothing to do with ethical standards or cultural shifts or the reporters/writers/editors not wanting to do much much better. Rather, at less than a penny per pageview, the only possible way to pay even a single salary is a plummeting free-fall down to the lowest common denominator and the basest of instincts. That is why facebook was able to make a biz model of it and every other site can't.

($45,000/year salary + 33% biz-overhead) / ($1 CPM x 5 ads per page) = 12 million pageviews per month.

You cannot get 12M pageviews per month in any local city, much less the ~100M it would take to have a small staff and an editor. Hence, all the local journalists are gone.