I think we're suffering from an excluded middle when it comes to this kind of intellectual property. Naturally, most readers want to pay zero. Naturally, owners of the publication think it is probably worth a couple hundred dollars a year to be this well-informed.

The current arms race got us scrapers, and then paywalls, and then ad-blocking archivers ...

But in reality, I might drop a penny to read a NYT article. Maybe a nickel. There's no reasonable way of performing microtransactions right now. Everything is still in hefty increments, so nobody can work out what the market would bear.