It reminds me how we were told in the 2000' there will soon be no quality music anymore because of bittorrent.
If journalism business model is not working anymore, it's journalists' fault, not readers' one : they are the ones who must adapt and find new ideas to make money. Allowing to buy article per article instead of requiring year long subscription would be a good start (I've already seen that, although I don't remember which title it was). Making it easy to buy an article would help too : using cryptocurrency, browser payment api, whatever, provided we don't have to go fetch our credit card, type a long sequence of numbers, and possibly wait for a 3d secure text message and still have to type an other code. Providing paypal as a payment option already helps a lot in that regard, for people who are logged into it (you basically just have to hit the "pay" button, no further step).
Then, there is obviously the attention span problem. Is there still a market for long articles? I often tell myself press kind of missed the hyperlink train. It would be so great to have a concise form of article, then you can expand a part of its content through hyperlink (or javascript) to learn more about it. This would make a good business model, by the way : cheap for short content, then the more someone wants to see (thus, the more that person is interested in the subject), the more they pay. There was something alike in the movie "Starship Trooper", where each video news sequence was short and there was multiple "learn more about" at the end of each sequence. With text, this would allow for even way more exploration possibilities. Of course, this would be a major shift in the way of writing an article, where journalists are currently basically writing essays in one block.
Which browser payment API are you referring to? And at least one major browser already autofills your payment info (heuristically identifying form fields; essentially zero sites actually mark up their form fields with identifying attributes) such that I pretty much never type my credit card number these days.
Credit card autofill never really worked for me (either on chrome or firefox). It happens on rare occasion that my credit card is pre-filled, but most of the time, it's not (not sure why). And you still have to get your phone and copy the 3d secure code from it (although, 3d secure is only used in europe, if I got it correctly). So yeah, credit card is good, but not enough, especially if we want to perform a big amount of microtransactions like the "pay to expand" example I was talking about.
If journalism business model is not working anymore, it's journalists' fault, not readers' one : they are the ones who must adapt and find new ideas to make money. Allowing to buy article per article instead of requiring year long subscription would be a good start (I've already seen that, although I don't remember which title it was). Making it easy to buy an article would help too : using cryptocurrency, browser payment api, whatever, provided we don't have to go fetch our credit card, type a long sequence of numbers, and possibly wait for a 3d secure text message and still have to type an other code. Providing paypal as a payment option already helps a lot in that regard, for people who are logged into it (you basically just have to hit the "pay" button, no further step).
Then, there is obviously the attention span problem. Is there still a market for long articles? I often tell myself press kind of missed the hyperlink train. It would be so great to have a concise form of article, then you can expand a part of its content through hyperlink (or javascript) to learn more about it. This would make a good business model, by the way : cheap for short content, then the more someone wants to see (thus, the more that person is interested in the subject), the more they pay. There was something alike in the movie "Starship Trooper", where each video news sequence was short and there was multiple "learn more about" at the end of each sequence. With text, this would allow for even way more exploration possibilities. Of course, this would be a major shift in the way of writing an article, where journalists are currently basically writing essays in one block.