Who's going to pay people to do real news? It's not a hobby
IMHO the problem is that it's still too hard to pay for something like an online newspaper. From a usability perspective, I want to enter in some payment information once and then be able to read seamlessly for a year (for example). Meaning that I don't want to share a bunch of personal information, or my FaceBook profile, and I don't want to create a separate userID to log into the site.
Part of this comes down to having an ID that is both reliable and portable across devices, while not being tied to other personal information, and requires zero effort from the user. That's a hard problem, but I think it's one that needs to be solved.
The ID thing is not difficult and keeping it anonymous is also pretty easy, but I don't think anonymity should be required. It should be an option.
The ID thing does not exist. I've said this before, the internet needs strong identity to resolve a lot of problems. You can always strip identity away in places that require anonymity. The problem here is that if you go to the online newspaper, there is no way for them to know who you are to verify the prior payment. I guess that line of thought narrows the problem - they don't need to know who you are, only that you've paid, but that's very close to the same thing.
Think of it like google/fb login. I can ask for the bare minimum on my site and basically just get a token. It doesn't tell me who you are, but just that you have an ID in the google/fb system.