The technology for this is mostly boring, off the shelf stuff. Or it should be. Crypto might help but is probably more of a distraction than an asset given all

The technology for this is mostly boring, off the shelf stuff. Or it should be. Crypto might help but is probably more of a distraction than an asset given all the scams, hypes, etc. that surrounds it. But building such a thing on e.g. Stellar or something similarly suitable for fintech and micropayments would be pretty doable. I actually know one company in this space, Satoshi Pay, that have been trying to do this using Stellar. The issue is that building something like this is something that needs funding. You need engineers, lawyers, financially savvy people, etc. The tech side is actually the easy part. This in turn often implies companies and central control and ownership. Investors get involved and from then on it's about them getting a return on investment rather than actually solving the problem. And of course these companies start competing with each other and start creating walled gardens. And then there are people inside the walls and outside the walls. And of course multiple walled gardens just makes it worse. That's basically the history to date of micropayments: it has not worked so far and IMHO it cannot work this way. In my view, such a thing would instead have to be run and coordinated by non profit organizations (you'd probably need multiple legal entities in different countries) and be based on open standards. Getting that organized is not primarily a technical problem. In fact, it would probably be best for journalists themselves to get organized and jointly own such a thing instead of waiting for some entrepreneur to wave a magic wand to make it happen. You could fund this from memberships. For example authors wishing to earn on the platform could pay a flat fee per year in exchange for a cut of the monthly revenue based on the performance of their content or some other rules. That way 100% of money payed to readers would go to content creators and the platform maintenance would be payed for by the receivers of that money. And you could simply withhold that from their monthly earnings. For example 10$ per author adds up quickly. It basically means that they'd only need 100 reads at 10 cents. Anything beyond that would be profit. A few tens of thousands of authors like that could manage to fund a pretty sizable organization + hosting and other cost.