Financial news outlets have long been successful at this -- Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, etc. They are able to build strong businesses with a relatively small audience often because that audience is willing to pay large sums of money for access. (Bloomberg Terminals reportedly cost up to $25k/yr! https://www.bluegamma.io/post/bloomberg-terminal-pricing#:~:...
Still -- how much value do you get from the Washington Post? How much value do you get from knowing about the inner workings of your government? Federal, state, municipal, any of them? Does being a better citizen have a financial incentive? Can you put a price on knowing about the situation in Ukraine, or Gaza, or even the dangerous intersection downtown?
And without that, how do you justify payment for journalism, which itself is expensive? Or is the answer that the payment comes from people who want to push a narrative, or control the conversation? Is there a monetary value to preventing that?
A couple of places have tried diversifying content towards what readers will pay for; NYT has done probably the best job with the branching out towards cooking, Wirecutter, etc. that people do want to pay for. Buzzfeed attempted to do the same for clickbait to fund real journalism but that fizzled out.
I'm asking how do you quantify the underlying value. As a consumer of news, how am I richer now than I was before reading? And is it possible to put a number on it?
If you enjoy crosswords, new recipes, or product reviews, that also has some value people are willing to pay for. (NYT)
Historically, journalism has mostly been finding out about what cross-subsidy works, whether that's real estate, sports, scandalous gossip, etc. that people will actually pay for. There isn't a whole lot of people paying for just the main stories for the news.