Also, the major driver of this news is Google's attempts to get Australia to drop legislation. Australia is about as far away from Europe as you can get
This isn't a fair characterization. They want their content to be indexed by Google, and furthermore most of those entities have separate distribution channels (television networks, print newspapers, etc.) that Google can't touch. Most people don't want to buy newspapers or watch news channels, but frankly they are absolutely correct, because 99% of that is freaking garbage no better than your average Facebook group.
> Australia
s/Europe/politicians-worldwide/g
My point wasn't about Europe in particular (just observing that this kind of move, for better or for worse, is more popular in the EU). Again, I do agree that we should do something about Google & friends, but this piece of legislation is the classical politician's fallacy: we should do something, this is something, hence this is good.
I would argue most people don't want to buy newspapers because we have created an expectation that content should be free.
As to the quality of the content, a) that's subjective and b) it can be seen as natural evolution of an industry whose income source has been decimated by Google/Facebook. It's a lot cheaper to produce what you (and I do as well, to be fair) consider garbage than to produce the quality content we would like to see coming from newspapers.