Pay-per-article might make some sense, but every time I've seen that they've charged more than I think it's worth. They generally want about a dollar, and I'm thinking pennies. And, of course, I have to decide whether it's worth purchasing before I've read it; at which point it comes down to trusting the publisher - and then maybe I should just get a subscription.
The odds that they will completely overlap are low. However, most people don't have 20. Even those who do mostly read a number of prominent sources: nyt, wapo, wsj are the big three for news these days. Most people subscribe to one, maybe two and read that. This is arguably bad for competition and bad for "indie journalism".
Also, I take issue with some of the points of view espoused by the nyt. Their news content is fairly good (if biased), but my subscription would also go to pay their editorial board. I don't want to purchase that news, because I don't want to fund its production. I wish I could buy a news-only subscription: no "lifestyle", no "fashion", no "editorial", etc. I don't want that stuff. Just news.
Then I realized after seeing what has happened as the masses all came online, while many of us here can probably distinguish between a reliable news source and a hack site or a propaganda outlet—a disturbingly large segment of the population can not.
And to make matters worse, there seems to be a huge number of people who don’t realize they don’t have what it takes to do reliable research to write a story and they don’t have what it takes to understand nuanced subjects in order to explain the subject to readers. Or even worse, they fully realize how ill-equipped they are but don’t care because vulnerable people will still click their ads.
Long story short, I now have just short of 20 subscriptions. Including a few that I rarely read but to me it’s worth it. The collective We really need to increase the signal levels in order to hear over the noise.
Journalism is definitely one of those cases where The Market can easily lead to a race to the bottom situation. Hopefully we’ll see it correct and good journalism will overtake trash, but wow what a rough spot.