I think that 'reputable' and 'tons of ads and trackers' do not belong in the same sentence.
Ad-supported business models incentivize the creation of large quantities of content, because you need a lot of pageviews to earn a little bit of money with ads (since most people either ignore or block ads, if they manage to load the page to see them at all).
High quality journalism should have value that we are ready to pay for, like we did for hundreds of years. This concept is called the "newspaper".
You are expected to pay for high quality baker or a tailor, book, movie or music, why not for getting information that "only" has the power to shape societies? If I see information next to an ad, I personally tend not take it too seriously.
What is missing right now from a technology standpoint is an easy way to manage subscriptions, built into my browser as default. Expecting the user to create and manage a separate account/billing identity for every publisher is what is preventing this model to take off (IMO).
1) they ask for an unreasonable amount of money. If they could just charge what they'd otherwise earn from ad impressions on that particular page view, it would be fine.
2) there is no global, anonymous (from the website's perspective - I don't mind the payment processor keeping records for AML/KYC purposes) micropayments system, and card payment fees make micropayments unsustainable
3) subscribing to the website requires providing personal details, with no guarantee they won't be used for tracking/marketing/etc. Cancelling a subscription is also intentionally made difficult - see the New York Times.
4) all paywalls require subscriptions - there's no "pay per view" mechanism. Do they really expect every web user to have a subscription to dozens of different news websites? Unless you literally spend all day reading news, it's bad value for money.
Ad-supported business models incentivize the creation of large quantities of content, because you need a lot of pageviews to earn a little bit of money with ads (since most people either ignore or block ads, if they manage to load the page to see them at all).
High quality journalism should have value that we are ready to pay for, like we did for hundreds of years. This concept is called the "newspaper".
You are expected to pay for high quality baker or a tailor, book, movie or music, why not for getting information that "only" has the power to shape societies? If I see information next to an ad, I personally tend not take it too seriously.
What is missing right now from a technology standpoint is an easy way to manage subscriptions, built into my browser as default. Expecting the user to create and manage a separate account/billing identity for every publisher is what is preventing this model to take off (IMO).