That's essentially what Medium is. If you consider that their goal is to get newspapers to publish on their platform, their premium subscription is basically what OP is describing in his post.

Edit: Samschooler beat me to it.

I think this is what Medium is trying to be. They introduced members only articles a few months ago where a portion of the subscription goes to the author.

That's super interesting. I think others are right, that's a lot like Medium.

But, what about when a reader doesn't really know which author they like. What if they just read the entertainment section of one newspaper, fun stories from some other magazine, and whatever's dominating the news cycle from that national paper somewhere else?

What happens on YouTube? People can look at the "home" page and see recommended articles. Also, sites like HN and reddit can link back to articles.

Check out Substack, they're working on exactly this: https://on.substack.com/p/a-better-future-for-news