I LOVE this idea and advocate for it in private convos all the time. Banning ads and enabling (micro-)payments for accessing content that is currently ad-supported would be an unimaginable game-changer.
2) aren't you paying indirectly anyways? (With only a part of the revenue actually landing in the bags of the operator of the site - another part is used to fund Google Chrome and people who design ads)
In terms how one can consider oneself about news, I think this is closer to uninformed than the other way. But that's me.
Unimportant info is filtered, that realy important that somehow affect me get quite quickly. Most conversation about news are irrelevant thus I have more time to do other things.
News are mostly distraction and emotion flow anyway, I'm not sure why consumption is considering as informing. There are plenty other subjects that I consider much more informative.
Then there is publicly accessible news forcibly paid by everyone.
I guess even without ads content without subscriptions would still exist to attract people, however the reality might shift completely if micro payments became a thing (i.e. paying a few cents for every news you view - could be enabled by something like a digital currency like digital euro).
Currently manu are informed by news which attracts many clicks (incentives through ads), which might be considered more disinformation than news.
People might have more money in the bags, because they'd pay less to marketing departments designing and paying for ads.
Lots of things to consider
wouldn’t it actually feel good to patronize websites you were interested in with actual direct value instead of everyone relying on spyware and obnoxious spam covering content directed at you?
I don't want my browser just paying everything willy nilly but I also don't want to be nagged every time I access a news article as to whether or not I agree to 6 satoshis.
There could be ways of addressing that; browser extensions may make it a configurable option with the default of "ask for everything" being the absolute safest way forward.
Decent use of the http/402 error code, and sort of exactly what the L402 folks are working toward resolving.
(See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048747>.)
Micropayments: no.
As I've said before: Micropayments have an absolutely unblemished three decade history of perfectly and precisely failing to work.
(Why? See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>.)
Alternative: an all-you-can-eat bundling option with a wide selection of publishers. We're already starting to see this with, e.g., commercial wireless / broadband plans, though largely limited to the major streaming platforms rather than news/journalism sources.