Guess how many people subscribe to the Times and are willing to actually pay to read another article? <830,000 worldwide. Paywalls have been implemented, monetization models have been tweaked - you can't change habits. People are habituated to getting their content online for free. They're not willing to pay for it in the vast majority of cases.
If we're talking online news content, there's just a ton of different outlets and I don't see people being willing to pay individually on an article-by-article basis. Maybe if you aggregated content under one subscription model (like the music industry does wit Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) and distributed revenue to publishers based on readership, it could work for a small minority of consumers. But even that seems like a stretch.