Google actually tried this, but it failed: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor</a><p>Apple News+ does something similar: <a href="https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/</a><p>There's another system like this: Your local library turns tax dollars into free books and articles, sometimes digital ones too. Worth checking. At the very least, many bigger ones have on-site (on their network) access to digital newspapers, journals, and magazines.<p>----------<p>I think it's the same reason we used to have all streaming on Netflix, but now every content publisher has their own streaming service. They make more that way, presumably, and have a branded product rather than relying on some intermediary that blends them altogether into an amorphous blob of "content".<p>They don't want to see articles turn into generic commodities the way movies, games, and music already are. The newspaper industry is barely alive as it is, and losing money and people every year... maybe they'll see another boost from the inevitable controversies of the new administration (again), as they did in 2016-2020, but short of that, it's kinda a dying industry with a lot of consolidation and reused/syndicated content.<p>If you don't want to pay, just go to APnews.com. It's where most smaller papers get their stories from anyway.