The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.
People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.
Also Substack and Medium.
The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
The issues are:
1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct.
2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data.
I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period.
Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway.
The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.