The way you target niche markets is by paying niche publishers who target those niche markets. The only reason this argument seems reasonable is that we're accepting that Facebook is the omnipublisher who is responsible for all information.

Supporting small publishers is at least as important as supporting small businesses. It would be nice if your small town news site got ads for local florists, they might be able to pay for a journalist without begging for direct payments. Paying directly to read journalism is stupid and will never work - people read things they hate and do not want to support, people don't know how to value the site that they read one story a week from (or how to pay that tiny amount), forcing people to pay limits the reach of your reporting when the reason you write is to convince or inform - ideally, you'd pay people to read what you write; a coupon for a local florist or the information that a restaurant is opening in your neighborhood is a nice micro-compensation.

Advertising, patronage by the wealthy, and/or ideological propagation are the only natural models for journalism, and SV giants sucking up all the advertising is destroying that. Now we're supposed to care about their problems while they pretend to care about ours.