Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

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.

The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.

People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.

Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)

On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.

There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.

Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism

Much the same if you ask me.