> Why is it that people like Adriene can make this work, and get young people to pay this much money when traditional publishers struggle to get people to pay anything at all?
Because "Adriene" sells yoga classes, not news. I do agree that a lot of the publishers mentioned are screwed because they are no longer needed. A yoga magazine needs to figure out what it can sell, but if anything it cannot compete in yoga classes, those are available in simply a better form online. But this is not news.
News is a newsroom reporting on things of interest. This is difficult because there are many things to cover and good people covering it are expensive. So would Spotify for news work? I worked for a relatively large newspaper and tried pitching this idea years ago. By pitching I mean I chatted about this with people at parties, but whatever. Anyway, the feedback I got was that these ideas floated around years ago, bit didn't stick. My feeling is that most newspapers are trying to find subscribers who will trust the newspaper with their life and use it exclusively to get news. There is logic in this, e.g. it's better to have 100k subscribers that will be your core audience than to have potentially millions of users but you have to fight for them and their clicks every day. Long term however I don't think it will work. This idea is becoming too foreign for people, especially young people.
I did not actually call this Spotify for news, instead I called it cable for news. After all mostly you do not pay for every single program you get on cable, it's bundled and everyone gets a piece. I think this will end up happening one way or the other because newspapers are increasingly concentrating and it's only a matter of time before someone offers a subscription for all the products in their portfolio, if they're not doing it already. To this I also feel there is a big technical obstacle in that because all of these products run often on different technical stacks and integrations that make it often too painful to implement.
