I briefly worked at a startup that was trying to build this. It's technically possible in a lot of different ways, but the business culture is so far removed fr

I briefly worked at a startup that was trying to build this. It's technically possible in a lot of different ways, but the business culture is so far removed from this approach that it seems impossible right now. The sites that are still successful are all convinced they are on track to own the entire online news media market and won't do anything to give up an absolute iron grip on their experience and readership, especially if it might mean acknowledging the existence of a competing news source. The smaller regional and local news sites are all basically zombie companies now anyway. They buy an off-the-shelf newspaper CMS tool, add in every possible monetization plugin they can possibly cram into the tool, an AP feed, and hire like 3 part time journalists to add in just enough shallow local flavor that nobody cares about so that they can try to get some clicks in their local market. They aren't motivated to participate in systems that let you buy content, because they don't actually make any content.