They aren't Apple but they do the pay per article thing.
I designed such a system in 2012 and was granted a patent for it late last year. I asked a professional about what to do next and the advice was "wait until someone is infringing". Not hugely satisfactory.
I wanted to build the scheme described in the article. My goal was: fix the internet. The way it's paid for breaks it. Fix the money and the rest would follow.
Everyone who's thought about this problem for more than 10 minutes has hit on the same basic business model. I hit on it in 2008, I wasn't the first. Since then I've watched business after business fail in this area. The problem has never been the technology and I'm not sure if a successful shared scheme will ever emerge.
Seems to me like a patent is a good start, a good nucleus around which you could build some venture capital to actually try to start a company to solve the problem.
I totally agree that the problem isn't technology, it's the business side, the negotiation and that end. You'd need a very business-y business partner.
I go back and forth on whether to try and raise funds. It's an all-or-nothing proposition because of my visa status. There are also personal considerations involved.
Having worked for a mixed services/enterprise company, I am now keenly aware that sales is a strategic necessity and steady PR is a massive force multiplier. You can have the best everything in the world, but if nobody's buying, it doesn't matter.
And credible news has always spent more on content creation than niche news. The cost of content creation has not fallen, while the cost of distribution has fallen dramatically.
So, it's completely natural that the price difference at the consumer side between high and low quality news would have changed dramatically.
The problem is that you hit a news story on the major aggregators (google news, at least, gives you a bunch of stories on the same topic from different newspapers) and you have to pay money to the more credible sources, while the completely wacky takes are often free.
Personally, I'd really like it if apple (or someone similar with a history of, you know, treating users as customers) would create a news service where I give apple twenty bucks a month, and it lets me read 100 news articles from the major papers, distributing some of that revenue to the papers in question. (they could even have tiers. or an easy way for me to 'buy this article' for two fifty or whatever. Heck, the NYT could setup an easy apple pay 'buy this article for two fifty' button without more apple help than is required to make apple pay work, and I'd probably use it at least once a week.)
As is, I periodically subscribe to the NYT on my kindle, but while the reading experience on the kindle is wonderful, the discovery experience is terrible. I usually read it for a while, then I cancel after realizing I haven't been using it (see the discovery complaint)