Also, I believe that the power of FREE is not about money. It's about avoiding the hassle of paying.I think the power of free is mostly about money. Look at Freecycle(.org) - the hassle in offering something that you give away for free, sifting through all the responses, going through the whole arrange time/place shennanigans, then somebody has to drive for miles to get to you - sure the person posting it has some non-monetary satisfaction about keeping something out of the landfill, but the person getting it? They are coming because it is free. If you offer one item on Freecycle for free and one on Craigslist for a cent, I bet you will have better uptake with Freecycle, even though 99% the hassle of the transaction is unrelated to paying.
That said... I agree that in the case of online news content in particular, the payment hassle is a factor, because it is a barrier to people (like me) who are not averse to paying. For example I would be perfectly willing to throw $100 in a yearly pot (or whatever a subscription to one newspaper would really cost), spend a year reading whatever I wanted hassle-free and upvoting (karma-style) the stuff I liked, and then at the end of the year have that $100 get distributed in the same way I distributed my karma. It could work, but the infrastructure and co-ordination is beyond what is plausible, I suppose.