> I would rather pay people and websites for content.

I do not think that this is a workable model. Firstly, because it leads inevitably to monopolization, because you don't want to pay 50,000 people for content, you want to pay 10 people for content. Secondly, because most content is bad and a waste of time and you don't find out until after you've bought it. Thirdly, and most importantly, is that there's no actual, clear separation between "news" and "advertising."

Content is generated because people who want that content generated sponsor it beforehand, and dictate the conditions under which the delivery of that content will be accepted as a fulfillment of that sponsorship. The people sponsoring that content can have any number of reasons for doing it; it can make them money directly (i.e. I have articles about cats, people who like cats subscribe to my cat website), which if you're a linear thinker you think is the only way, or it can make them money indirectly, maybe by leading consumers to particular products or political stances that they have a stake in.

This is simply the truth. Your preferences don't matter, and it's not a moral question. If you pay for content, you're more valuable to advertise to, not less. A lot of work is put into producing trash that you regret having read or watched, and was really intended to make you support Uganda's intervention in a Zambian election (or whatever.) If you "value" reading it, you've failed an intelligence test. Its value is elsewhere for the people to paid for it to be written.

What's recently shown itself to scale is small groups of people sponsoring journalists and outlets who put out tons of content for free. The motivation of those sponsors is usually to spread the points of view of the journalists they sponsor widely, because they believe them to be good.

There was never a pay model that supported things that people didn't feel passionate about or entertained by. Newspapers cost less than the paper they were written on. Television news was always a huge money loser that was invested in to raise the social status and respectability of the network. If you feel passionately about anything, you're far better off paying people to listen, to give you a chance, than to lock away content. Journalism as a luxury good can work, but only for Bloomberg terminals and Stratfor, when it is used to make other lucrative decisions by its buyers.

> orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them

This is simply sponsorships by governments and billionaires. Never ever been any significant shortage of that (the patron saint of this is King Alfonso X.*) All of those people have wide interests that can often be served by paying for media to be produced or distributed. It's where we got our first public libraries from.

For me, the fact that Substack and Patreon almost work is more important, and is something that wouldn't have been as easy without the benefits that the internet brings for the collaboration of distant strangers.

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[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile#Court_cul...