"This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws."
Translation: "We can't put an article online without cramming it with cookies, analytics and other annoyances that serve no other purpose than profiling users; we actually don't want to protect your data, but they caught us with the pants down and enacted laws to prevent all this, so we'd rather block access from the EU than do the right thing, that is, protecting your data by removing that junk."
"all of our pages are full of things that the EU wants us to ask permission for. Since we only get a small amount of EU traffic, we can't be bothered to spend the money to deal with your laws, please go do something else. You are important to us - elsewhere."
It is a tricky thing. At some point someone needs to be paid for writing the article. I can think of 3 ways to accomplish that at the moment:
1. Government subsidizes media. No cookies or profiling required. However, unclear if one government should support articles that are mostly read abroad and, of course, there are many issues with this related to equitable distribution of funds and impartiality.
2. They can run ads. However, ads tend have better ROI when well targeted which requires profiling. For instance, if I am reading an article about suits. If they know my age they can make sure to show me people around my age wearing that suit. Which makes me more likely to envision myself wearing it and thus buy it. Cookies (or similar) required.
3. A paywall where the reader pays for it directly. However, we seem to be very resistant to that idea given we were trained to use a "free" (sell your data model) internet. Nonetheless, by seeing your browsing history from your account server-side (no analytics cookies needed) they can place you in cohorts server side. So not that much more private. If anything, less private since they have your real data through your payment method.
Ensuring privacy while still getting access to free things and not bankrupting companies (especially small ones) is a hard problem.
Spotify is one of a handful of music streaming products out there, and an absolute juggernaut that gives you access to basically all music and podcasts. By contrast, there are thousands of news sites, and subscribing to one of them only gives you access to their content. There is absolute no way "News Nation" is going to get enough dedicated subscribers to subsidize their reporting.
> we'd rather block access from the EU than do the right thing, that is, protecting your data by removing that junk
This phrasing is misleading. It's not "protecting our data" (implying they need to take extra precautions to prevent our data, defenseless on its own, from falling into the wrong hands).
It's refraining from actively spying on us. There's no "protection" needed - if they just do nothing, that would comply with the GDPR.
Translation: "We can't put an article online without cramming it with cookies, analytics and other annoyances that serve no other purpose than profiling users; we actually don't want to protect your data, but they caught us with the pants down and enacted laws to prevent all this, so we'd rather block access from the EU than do the right thing, that is, protecting your data by removing that junk."