Well, there is https://www.pressreader.com , which has the potential to be Netflix for journalism. Would be great if more publishers worked with them.
A true game changer would have to be one that people paid money for, and served ultimately to pay for real journalism. That has also been tried many times, with no success that I'm aware of.
I don't mind paying for news, but most newspapers charge in the range of $20-$40 a month for digital subscriptions which just seems outrageous to me. I can listen to a bottomless well of music for $10/mo on Spotify, watch a huge catalog of shows and movies on Netflix for roughly $10/mo, or subscribe to a handful of newspapers for $200/mo. Is journalism so, so much more expensive to produce than entertainment?
There's a temporal component here that's much more important for journalism than it is for those other two forms of entertainment.
For example, The Shawshank Redemption was made 23 years ago and is still a fantastic movie: People will still pay to watch that movie. In contrast, very few people will pay money to read a news article from even two days ago (let alone 23 years ago).
Sony could never produce another movie again and have a sizable revenue stream just from distribution rights on their existing film catalog. The NYT can't really do that, the demand for old news articles just isn't that great.
The equivalent of a news subscription then isn't really Netflix or Spotify: It's going to the movies, or going to a concert, or buying an album. All of which are notoriously considered to be expensive affairs.
I'd even go so far as to say the NYT would probably absolutely let you read older articles for cheap (a few $ a month), but the demand for that is non-existent so it's silly to even offer.
Downside: A lot of the publications are insignificant/ very similar to each other. They do have some good ones like the Guardian, but I'm still missing some personal favourites, so haven't joined yet.