Instead of a freelance writer pitching a story to an editor of the NYT, throw it up on a site where the pitches can be seen and funded directly by their potential audience.
If the NYT was going to pay a few hundred dollars for the article, that's a very low threshold for funding.
Obviously writers with a portfolio of past work will have an advantage in that system, but even fresh talent could build up a portfolio with interesting pitches at low funding goals.
A lot of content curation is built around a paradigm where the editors speculate about what their audience actually wants, and that's not always very accurate.
I recall a friend who wrote about sexual politics for major publications who had a hard time getting a pitch for a story on child free attitudes sold to the editor, and yet that piece ended up the most read and shared for the year.
Remove the middleman and allow writers to sell the pitch directly to the audience - who if they care about it enough will fund it and read it when finished. And then don't care about trying to control or hinder further distribution or handicapping the piece/headline to optimize clicks or ads.
Monetize the creation and not the distribution.
In particular for written content, the threshold for funding is low and the bar for execution is as well, which skirts a lot of the issues the actual Kickstarter has.
And if funding is anonymous, there isn't any direct issue with undue influence from benefactors.
There's a number of written pieces I'd happily pay to help bring into existence. And a number of other pitches that even if I wouldn't be interested in funding, I'd be interested in creating an account to vote up to increase visibility to those that would, and in both cases being notified when that content finally exists.
But I have very little interest in simply funding an author in general, or paying to access content when summaries of anything important will exist elsewhere, or even in wasting my time with free material that's over engineered towards clickbait and maximizing my scrolling to serve the most ads.
In particular, I'd love to fund a return of actual investigative journalism on topics I'd value.
We saw the short tail of this in action with Sanderson on the actual Kickstarter, but I definitely think there's a long tail model viability on a specialized platform for written content.
In any case, good luck with the new role.