I would pay double my local newspaper subscription if it would get me access to a couple dozen articles from other newspapers each month, especially regional papers where I’m never going to subscribe for that one-off piece about a friend but I want them to survive.
> I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication"
Or just a clearinghouse model. I buy a "news pass" loaded with some amount of credits. When I go to a site I can choose to use these credits to read full articles. Perhaps just having the pass gives me a longer preview than non pass holders.
> grip on the music industry
It's the other way around unfortunately.
Publishers need to find some way to recreate that universal access feeling of the ad years with a subscription. Everything else feels like a downgrade from freeloading and nobody wants to pay for a downgrade.
One model that could work, I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication" mechanism: you subscribe on your "home news source", but it also gets you some form of "paying visitor" access on other sites that are completely unrelated except for being on the same "inverse syndication" network. That network would then do some crude redistribution based on views, like how (I think?) the Spotify subscription gets distributed: a view by a user with few cross-publisher views would give more redistribution than a view by a user that spends the entire day consuming "inversely syndicated" content. Distribution rules would be something end users would not have to be concerned with, same for defining what exactly publishers are expected to include in "paying visitor" access (I think it should be allowed to be a little worse than "home news source" access?).
The key requirement would be that participating sources would have to be all shades of claiming neutral (instead of just one side of the aisle), and ideally also regional, from all regions (just like adtech gave us the possibility to "pay" with local ads on a regional news site half a planet away).
So why not "Spotify for news"? Because no trade wants to give away the keys to their entire effective market. I'm looking not only at Spotify's (+Apple, Google, Amazon) grip on the music industry, also at booking.com's (+AirBnN) grip on lodging. Journalism absolutely cannot want that. They need to get their stuff together and federate a coop.