It's interesting to see how no one even seems to try. In Europe there's Blendle [1], but that's only an aggregator and you still have to pay for each article you read (with hilarious differences in pricing). I've always wondered if they'd be more successful with a flat fee for complete access to all articles for all their papers and zines. But I guess the publishing houses don't consider this viable as it would hurt their subscriptions (who's gonna subscribe to just one paper when there's access to ten more for roughly the same price?).

[1] https://blendle.com

Spotify to the music industry is like putting some ice on a broken neck. The music industry at least has concerts and merchandise to drive revenues up.

The problem is that news is very expensive to produce; particularly investigative journalism that might or might not pay off. Local news at the town or suburb level has a similar issue, where the market is quite small to begin with. Strip away the expensive parts and you're left with cheapo aggregator papers. But what happens when there's nothing left to aggregate?