You can already pay the journalist's employer, but ultimately your dollars will likely be going to a hedge fund owner or a billionaire like Bezos that buys up media and pays the journalist a bare minimum to keep them generating clicks.

For everyone else that doesn't pay, they'll ask their AI owned by billionaires to summarize the reporting and be satisfied.

What you're suggesting is supporting independent journalism not owned by a hedge fund or billionaire, which will eventually be acquired by capitalist interests unless you somehow magically convince all your neighbors that it's worth monetarily supporting for a greater good.

The people willing to pay $20/mo for AI are not as likely to pay $20/mo to support independent information sources at the same time, especially if you have to first pay to understand what they provide. This is why publications make their reporting freely available to crawlers, like WallHop.

If you regularly use WallHop to access reporting important to you, it's expected you make the investment if you know it will benefit the reporter and not a hedge fund owner/billionaire instead.

Inadvertently, as more high-quality reporting becomes gated behind a paywall, the major AI providers have a financial incentive to pay high-quality information providers with compensation for their original work, which could benefit independent journalists if such a thing were to happen. News exclusives provided to Google, Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, or OpenAI would be interesting to see. Would competing AI agents cite their competitors as a news source? Some AI giants are starting their own bio labs, so why not newsrooms?