Most news outlets used to have RSS feeds which, once upon a time before it was removed from a lot of big websites (such as news outlets), allowed lots of people to get a feed of what was published. It worked for a lot of years and, if kept up and published, it could probably have given Twitter a run for its money. You could share the feeds you followed or even build public feeds from that (there are stil a bunch of them, mostly named after planets, for very niche things), so you could have a network effect.

Twitter doesn't have a paid service for users (it has paid access to their API, just in case somebody on this site still had doubts about what really is their core business), I was just making a (probably poorly phrased) example.