I really dislike ad driven publications. I’m not opposed to paying for quality news publication, but for something like NYT, there’s only a couple articles a month I come across that I’m really interested in reading. There problem is that there’s 4-5 other paywalled publications where I have that same issue. I’m interested in their content, I just can’t justify the subscription price for the small amount of content from them I’ll actually consume, and I really can’t justify paying subscriptions for 4-5 publications at once.
I would pay $5-10 a month for a news aggregator for paywalled publications. It could be set up in a way that the publications get paid per view of their articles, it could be opened up to independent writers as well (e.g. integrate your substack with it). Maybe even an additional fee that includes digital magazine publications as well.
I can’t imagine it would be worse for the industry (unlike Spotify), as it already seems like journalism/news is hovering above collapse. They would be making money off of people who weren’t providing revenue previously.
I recently found ground.news. it is an interesting news aggregator sight in that it combined multiple sources for each story. It doesn’t really answer some of your needs but for each story it shows you which sources are pay-walled and which ones aren’t.
Omg this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I do a lot of media monitoring for work and have been using MBFC to try to measure how reliable my current Google Alerts are, because it throws up some weird and wild news sources.