Start a club and grant access to (full online) texts to club members, only. Keep a fixed percentage of the revenue for administration. Say, 30 or 40 percent. This is where your profit comes from. Spend the rest of the money for people creating the value: reporters, journalists, photographers, or even club members.
Start with a fixed budget for a year and an initial membership price. If revenue (fee * members) exceeds the budget, send a refund to members or raise the budget for the next year. If it doesn't, stop the club or raise the membership fee for next year. You may let members vote on that issue.
Let people follow (as exemplified by Twitter) the journalists they want to read. Journalists followed by many are obviously popular, and thus valuable. In other words: Make them celebrities, to some degree. Inform club members about new pieces of the journalists they follow by mail or SMS. Provide an interface for members that resembles a feed reader: A member only gets to see information from journalists he or she follows. Let members vote on articles.
Create an incentive to journalists to advertise their commitment to a certain club. For example, make a part of their payment depend on the numbers of followers they have. You may also allow them to employ other journalists (or ghost-writers). Then, they may utilize their blogs and appearances in other media to point to 'their' club. They could engage with their reader community (by answering comment discussions, for example).
In other words: Your sales pitch is not about the news you provide, anymore, but the access you provide to (popular) journalists.
You may also let members follow other members and show only comments made by them (or notify about new comments). Invite members with lots of followers to write articles. This creates an incentive to members to write good comments. You may also increase to incentive to be a club member by letting people become members by invitation, only. Being a "Wall Street Journal Club Member", for example, could mean something. If you provide a page for each member, they may use it on their usual web presence (LinkedIn, etc.)
Offer some free content on the site; for example, general news, introductions to popular articles, outdated articles, or comments (or discussions by your journalists. Make is SEO-friendly so people can link to it and Google can pick it up. You could use advertising to finance the free part.
This has the following effect: Firstly, they have an incentive to advertise the club: the more people participate, the more value they get (or the less they will have to spend). Secondly, there's an incentive for readers to withhold more valuable information to others (instead of spreading them and making money with Google Adwords). They are also less likely to spread their account information to others.
In other words: Create a mix of Digg, Twitter and Feed Readers and add a stronger incentive to keep information private.
Or course, that's just a quick summery. Comments welcome.