While I'm well aware I'm being pedantic, me and my brothers would share the comics together while my parents kept the news, up to 4 of us consuming 1 paper at a time. Realistically, the reading limit was due to the physical properties of the object and not an inherent property of information to be consumed through one avenue at a time

And what if the person picking up the paper would stand up and shout the content of the article so all the people on the train would hear?

Reminds me of the movie News of the World. The main character's job is going from town to town, reading newspapers aloud.

The news on a website is paid for by someone, else they would not be in business. And I only have one screen, I don't share it. The difference is physical vs. digital copies. A physical copy costs $.10 a digital copy costs $.0000001 (made up numbers), the business can take a loss of numerous digital copies before hitting the cost of one copy of the physical paper.

The problem is really that their business model sucks. They are working with fewer and fewer advertisers and much more competition and expecting business like they had before. And so we have a business that is attempting to fix itself with paywalls which don't work 100% of the time, but good enough to get the found newspaper analogy.