Advertisers need this information. We need advertisers if we are to continue supplying our news and related services for free. We could have done this. But the fall-out, the damage to our reputation and our inability to build a subscriber base going forward means that we will never contemplate using individual information for any other purpose than which it was supplied to us. This is no different to the situation in the real world.
People trust businesses with all kinds of personal information about themselves.
Some sell mailing lists and the like, their poor customers ending up deluged with junkmail from all and sundry. I cannot see the web working efficiently or to its full capablity without there being trust between users and operators of sites. Anonymous users who cannot be counted or tracked have no value to a website operator. Perhaps here is a market opportunity to set up a special news portal for users with disabled cookies. But I daresay that there would be a fee involved and that with this would go a password or some other system which allowed the website operator to identify his paying customers.