It is essential, but the ones I mention are something that is very hard to do without. While there are alternatives they're not widespread and require significant shift in operating style to roll out. Newspaper content is not a necessity so it doesn't work the same way.
I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.