Honestly, with a few tweaks (RSS support, titles on pages, getting rid of the 'Breaking News, Latest News and Videos' in every title) I'd pay $12/year for something like this. I'm pretty sure that CNN gets less than that from a statistical viewer of its pages.

Wouldn't it be awesome if pure text, static pages became the new normal, and we looked at video-and-image, JavaScript-laden SPAs in much the same way that we look at parachute pants, bowl haircuts and rhinestone-studded jean jackets?

given that the ads are likely to be blocked by the target audience of that site, either donations, or subscriptions seems to be a good answer.

Give it time. The original CNN site, many years ago, wasn't as slow and terrible as it is today. I'm not convinced history won't repeat itself if this version became popular.

They're probably going for native advertising.