The other factor is unbundling of newspapers. People used to pay for foreign bureaus and investigative journalism because they had to in order to see the classified ads for an apartment they wanted to rent or the score of last night's game.
You just reminded me that there’s a Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Ha! That's like the Buggy Whip University having a Henry Ford School.
Free “Alt” weeklies have been a thing pre-internet, but maybe some landlord’s thinking was that someone paying $1 for a newspaper was a better tenant (true or not).