> My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news.
I think that this is a fundamentally wrong headed idea. I might go farther and say that you're not going to create a new model for news, you're going to discover a new model, or you're going to accept the model that you know works, and figure out how to make it conform to your values without breaking it.
The facts: people who produce a lot of what we call news want it to be read. They write it because they have made a value judgement that it has importance, and that it should be reacted to by people. They should be backed by people who share those values - and those people should be paying for the news to be made and circulated to anyone who they can convince, beg, or trick into spending their time to understand what the producers of the news (both financiers and journalists) think is important.
This is the current actual model of the news, even though it still masquerades as a strange public service model adapted from network television news where OTA channels were required to do something in return for their use of the public airwaves. This was never the print model, which is that you have a boss, and you do what he says.
The other model of the news was never in danger. People will pay for sports and celebrity news and photographs because it is entertainment. People will even pay for crime news (of the titillating type, like violent street crime, rape and murder) because it also usually is entertainment masquerading as public service. None of that is in danger. It's important to be specific about what you're talking about.
I think that the way to save the endangered part of the news is the same way we need to save everything - more collaboration tools for individuals to form into groups. I think we see this forming with things like Substack, Patreon and Locals, etc., and what we need is to make this more decentralized, and not routed through a few gatekeepers all additionally gated by banks and credit card companies. 500 people should be able to start a newsroom of 10 people with their spare pennies, and get what they believe and what they think is important to the widest audience possible. The Substacks, Patreons, etc. have shown that it is not hard to get that many people together to pay a few bucks for something they believe in, or simply like.
If there's a tl;dr: you shouldn't be paying to read journalism; if anything, people should pay you to read their journalism. I wish I could take money from 80% of the garbage I wasted my time reading. We need microdebits, not micropayments.