[PaulHoule]

Wikipedia says they have been around since 2012

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

My guess is that people in the media are pretty aware of how to bypass paywalls because they have to do it to do their jobs (it used to be you could log into most of them with "media/media"; even The New York Times admits that reporters don't get paid enough to afford subscriptions to all of the newspapers that they need to use for fact checking and investigation.)

[bombcar]

Most "paywalls" can be bypassed with a clear-cookies or incognito window. They're not actually strong walls, they just want to be annoying enough that some people signup.