I agree with you in that we need to support the journalists doing the reporting. That's expensive, the companies that do it are mostly in dire financial straits, and most journalists themselves make very little money.
A universal subscription is incredibly difficult to set up logistically, especially wondering how you split up payments, who qualifies to be included, etc. Is it by traffic? That would incentivize clickbait even more.
Micropayments with fiat just have a lot of friction around them. The L402 standard being developed by Lightning Labs, among others, is promising, especially in conjunction with tools like Ark and Spark that make having access to the Lightning network something that the average person can muster (even if there's a certain loss of sovereignty in doing so compared to running a full Lightning node). Assuming people wouldn't just be okay with fully custodial Lightning through providers like Speed.app, Cashapp or Strike.me (and most would).
Even if it's used for tipping rather than gating, it seems like a no-brainer for news outlets to consider putting on their pages. Trivial even to put splits in place so that a portion goes to the journalist, a portion to the editor, perhaps some to the photographer, etc.
Legacy media is just slow to move, and of course, Bitcoin isn't particularly ubiquitous. There are also initiatives such as X402 that wouldn't involve Bitcoin, though to my understanding, they do at least all require some sort of blockchain rails -- mostly stablecoins.
I think the issue is psychological rather than currency. There's a judgment a user needs to make before reading every article where they can decide it's not worth it. X401 transactions are most likely crawlers, without that issue.
That said, micropayments have been tried over and over again, and fail. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/micropayment...
A universal subscription is incredibly difficult to set up logistically, especially wondering how you split up payments, who qualifies to be included, etc. Is it by traffic? That would incentivize clickbait even more.
I've written about my plan/thoughts here: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...