I would like to be able to get rid of the ads and pictures without losing text
You tagged common. Does it mean you want to paste in Writer, Impress and Draw which could be the targets of such a procedure? If not, retag with the name of the appropriate component (presumably writer)
text from newspaper - that means electronic text, right?!
The only solution I know is to mark single parts of text and to insert each of them step by step into a Writer document. Mostly by Special Paste | Unformatted.
Be advised that most electronic documents (like PDF, HTML or similar on the web) have specific format <tags> which cannot be interpreted by Writer and so disturb your Writer document if pasted unchanged, even text parts can be lost, as you write correctly…
Some websites offer a “printed view” or similar which mostly is in PDF format. Text extraction in this format sometimes can be easier…
I have used the menu → Special Paste → Unformatted method to copy text from web pages and it does eliminate the copied images quite conveniently. Recommended!
Sometimes you might want to make the copied text more neat by adjusting the spacing and boldening of titles, deleting captions, etc.
Which browser are you using? In my case using Firefox with Ubuntu, I can press Ctrl+Alt+R which takes you into read mode from which you can highlight the text you wish to copy and paste as required.