This is absolutely the number 1 reason the major news organizations don't want to bundle up, and in the case of the top 5 (NYT, WaPo, FT, Guardian), works. Interestingly the second reason is brand. Nobody wants brand dilution from being considered in a "pool" with other publications, because it will reduce their power to charge more for their product in ads and subscription. While small publications actually do want solutions like this, generally the large publications with readership are even more upset to be lumped in with the small publications than they are to be lumped in with their competitors.
One solution which I saw but wasn't worth my company's time to explore was finding a bundle of niche publications willing to work together on a shared content-for-pay solution and had a loyal readership willing to pay, and growing outwards from that seed. But that's a very uphill battle.
It's not a new idea and has been tried 100s of times. We tried it just a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820
Changing behavior is possible but will require major cooperation and money to do so, at the scale of both Facebook and Google working together to change things. Maybe that'll happen someday but I just don't see it.
So it goes two ways, citizens can wish for the news/content they want to see and content creators don't have to guess anymore what the people want to see.
I made it a bit like a social network where every user has an individual wish page so good reporters can build up a good reputation.
Feedback would be great, what do you think? Is there anything you would like to see on the platform?
They have a couple of titles. They really need to link up with the large local networks though.
But in the end, big companies who own the smartphone experience, such as Apple and Google will probably own the biggest news/content platforms.
But something like that will only happen when attractiveness for publications is maximised, which requires, amongst other things, that the platform avoids consumer facing lock-in or even just branding, because that would make publications (rightly) fear that they hand over whatever pre-existing digital subscriptions they already have to an exploitative intermediary. This in turn pretty much rules out the VC model for starting the platform, since eventually becoming exploitative is a required ingredient of the risk equation. But I see no reason why this could not work as a cooperative, because all the platform marketing would be directed at potential members. Consumer marketing, something in which a cooperative would tend to be inferior to a metrics-driven VC project (by a wide margin I suspect), would be left entirely to publications, who subsequently get to "own" the subscriptions they pulled in. Important design parameters would be the ratio between pooled and unpooled fees and the exact rules about weigh and how much content member publications would be allowed to keep exclusive to their direct subscribers. Outside of implementation, the biggest challenge would be to convince publications that few people would ever subscribe directly to multiple channels (how many people had now than one daily newspaper?) and that therefore, the content made available to subscribers of their peers would not cannibalize potential direct subscriptions very much.
Would also need to devise some way to get out of the coop, or structure it so that the members feel confident that it won't paint them into a terrible corner.
I'm not the right person to build this, it's mostly a BD problem (and I have a very long to-do list anyway), but I hope someone takes a stab at doing it right. Seems like various people have tried to do it as a more traditional startup, but I think the danger to the publications is probably too great with that structure, which would make it much harder to get buy in.