The Internet really wasn’t much of anything until 20 years ago. And with texting and twitter is when reporting regular people’s opinions as “news” really came about.
So what really stopped the subs for you 3 decades back?
I did the same thing in the mid-1970's...if you lived through it, the change in quality and dishonesty of reporting was very clear to anyone who read widely of news. Time and Newsweak went first. US News and World Report staved things off for a few years, but it too succumbed. Then magazines like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Scientific American all began to spout the same bullshit. It was like watching cancer spread....