Yeah...I'd much rather they offer a Netflix-esque platform for news articles. I can't really justify subscribing to a single site, but if I could get most of the major ones with one affordable subscription I'd probably do it.
I hear this all the time, it has to be a side effect of getting all your news through facespace and other news aggregators. There's really only a handful of newspapers worth subscribing to (in the US), if you aren't reading at least one regularly enough that you'd pay for it if you had to, your money is pretty much no good. I'd expect to see more and more paywalls in the coming months/years, the economics are better, pandering to large volumes of low value readers is a race-to-the-bottom that won't support good journalism.