Here we are on HN with many people complaining about free* Facebook, and then also complaining about pay services too. It takes money to run a world class news organization. Either that or they can get paid in non money equivalents like "likes" or page views which make everyone but them money. Where the value is to fool someone to come to your page so you can mine their data for ads, and serve ads. To get people to subscribe to you, you have to provide more value than that.