I am a longtime WSJ and Economist subscriber. My parents have been subscribers for decades (we used to also subscribe to SJ Mercury back in the day, and get the local town papers as well).
I read about 5 articles a day on the WSJ app and website, every day. It's one of the first and last things I do each day. But honestly the frequency of "big news must know" news items is pretty low, and there's a decent amount of news recycling or articles on a subject covered the day before but with minor updates.
In terms of value, I can totally understand if people balk at $400/yr.
Personally I think in terms of "news around the world affairs you can't miss", the Economist is much better than the Journal.
"A really good news service" is not what anyone wants in the information age. I want to read the best articles from the best news sources. If there were an Oracle that could find that for me, without extreme political bias, I would happily pay $1 a day.
The oracle is the publishing editor at the each news service. If you look on NYT.com for example, they carry their articles, Reuters, Associated Press, etc...
Wired had a pretty good article last week about the NYT's strategy that you might find interesting:
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journal...