I really wish the web would have adopted micropayments at the HTTP level as has been talked about since the late 1990s. I would be far more willing to toss a website a dime or quarter to read a single article than I am to buy a full subscription to your stupid regional newspaper I've never heard of before or since. Paywalls as they exist now are just dumb and kind of geo-lock news.

Beyond that, I personally take issue with Google not SEO banishing news companies for providing different results to Google than the average user. It's been over a decade since I've worked in the SEO industry but at the time that was a mortal SEO sin.