The problem is that per-article adds a lot of friction. If I buy a newspaper, I don't have to buy it by article or section. Nobody wants to think about "this is 3 cents to read the article linked on HN" and they also don't want a surprise $80 bill at the end of a month.
However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very narrow set of news sources and do most/all of your reading there." We're all news grazers now.
We need federation. Let me pay one flat $20 per month bill, and I can read freely from a really broad range of sites-- say "every newspaper from a large wire network" or "95% of the 1000 most popular magazines". It needs to be organized to rein in the publishers, to discourage the "we're the big draw, let's take our content and start a new service" syndrome that has ravaged video streaming.
That's what I like about Blendle [0]: you can request a refund for articles you don't like, so it makes the transaction almost frictionless. No need to think long and hard about the decision, just request a refund if the article is not up to your expectations.
I tend to think that the low takeup suggests that we already overprice some of these news services. Some also seem to be oddly priced for marketing reasons (for example, to make the print paper look like a good deal to potential online-only customers).
But on a network-of-services level, you also have a "value plateau" effect on both the supply and demand side though.
Each news source you add to a network typically provides a little less value than the one before. By the time you've got 100 newspapers in the network, number 101 is probably only contributing a few articles a year that weren't handled first or better by other papers, so nobody's going to pay much more to get it in their subscriptions.
And for readers, the number of interesting articles and the amount of time we have to read doesn't grow nearly as fast as the sheer number of available articles, so each additional provider doesn't produce that much more consumption.
So to be seen as a good value, we need a pricing model that tracks those "plateaus".
There actually aren't too many national news gathering services in the U.S. You generally have NYT, WashPo, Reuters, AssocPress. Even LATimes, BostonGlobe, and ChicagoTribune, which are big, focus most of their real reporting locally.
So for most general national news, there really isn't as much content as many would think, and adding each one still brings significant value.
The 100s of newspapers you refer to derive most of their content from the big ones, and maybe add their own analysis and slant.
A subscription model that provides access to 2 or 3 of the big ones, plus 1 or 2 local ones, and 1 or 2 special interest ones seems to make a lot of sense.
The New York Times subscription price that they show everywhere is also only for an initial introductory period of one year. I can't actually find the real, non-introductory price anywhere, and I know others have commented that it's really deeply buried. It's amazing how sleazy the billing practices of the big publications are.
Should newspapers cater to people who want to read a single article for pennies and walk away forever? I think not.
There is a much stronger interest to build a lasting relationship over time with their readership, so the reader becomes familiar with the paper's voice, credibility, and focus. This leads to more revenue: readers will pay more for content they respect). It also leads to better news: a stable revenue source allows papers to plan and better invest in their reporting.
However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very narrow set of news sources and do most/all of your reading there." We're all news grazers now.
We need federation. Let me pay one flat $20 per month bill, and I can read freely from a really broad range of sites-- say "every newspaper from a large wire network" or "95% of the 1000 most popular magazines". It needs to be organized to rein in the publishers, to discourage the "we're the big draw, let's take our content and start a new service" syndrome that has ravaged video streaming.