No, you have it wrong. Journalists should live off air, sunlight, and river water. They have no need for money and expecting to get paid is simply greedy.
Most people simply aren’t going to pay, so articles/sites might as well go behind a hard, credit card and login enforced paywall at this point. That way only those who pay can get access, there’s no workarounds, any republished articles can be easily DMCA’d, and republishers can be banned/sued.
Easy to bypass soft paywalls are going to be bypassed no matter what publishers/writers do, so it’s time to take a harder stance. If their content is economically viable they’ll be fine.
Frankly I was legitimately hoping this would be the viable use case for crypto. Allow a JS miner to run while you read and the profits go to the publisher. Like everything else crypto it was a dead on arrival idea thanks to bad actors.
In rich countries there has always been and always will be an elite that values and can pay for information. Subscription is an old model that has proven to work for centuries. The government official working at the foreign office reads a quality newspaper.
Media almost commited suicide when they adopted the advertising model.