It's not even remotely like cars replacing horses!

People went from owning a horse and carriage to owning a car. The car replaced the buggy and most people were OK with that because the car was a step up.

Nothing replaced newspapers. In most communities, there is no local news coverage now. None.

Ad revenue is no longer used to pay for news coverage. It just goes into billionaires' pockets. It's expensive to run a newsroom, even though the reporters are paid poverty wages. There's just no way to cover the costs of a local newsroom now.

You have propaganda and entertainment masquerading as national and international news but you don't have any local news at all and you have precious little actual national/international news.

THERE IS NO ONLINE VERSION BECAUSE THERE IS NO MONEY TO SUPPORT A NEWSROOM. I could start an online news outlet in five minutes. I could set everything up pretty easily. I know just how to do it. The cost of setting up the website would be essentially nothing. Paying even minimum wage to a handful of reporters? Nope, can't do it. Not possible. Online ads would could not even come close to covering that. Nobody has managed to make it work long-term with subscriptions, either. It takes a long time to convince thousands of people to subscribe and everybody who tries to start a local news operation runs out of money before they can get there.

In some places, local public radio and local TV provide a bit of coverage, but TV has never done a good job of covering local news -- because it's just too expensive.

https://medium.com/alternative-perspectives/news-media-802c341fe4c3

https://medium.com/minds-without-borders/destroying-democracy-one-newsroom-at-a-time-63c741f306f7