Personally I think the ICO is wrong here.
As has already been pointed out, there are salaries and other costs to be paid if you want news*. So you either pay directly (eg by taking a subscription), or you pay indirectly (the paper gets paid by advertisers). If you refuse the tracking cookies then the advertisers won't pay as much - so the difference has to come from somewhere.
At least they offer the choice - unlike the likes of FaecesBork who don't seem to have realised that GDPR (or indeed, any other law) actually exists.
And of course, no-one has mentioned all those sites that say "you can turn off these other cookies by going to [long list of scum sites] and ask them to stop tracking you".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
